How Much Do Meetings Actually Cost?

A one-hour meeting with six people feels like one hour of lost productivity. It is actually six hours — one per person — plus the overhead your employer pays on top of salaries.

The math is simple. The number is almost always larger than people expect.

The basic formula

Meeting cost = Attendees × Loaded hourly rate × Duration (hours)

Where loaded hourly rate = (Annual salary × Overhead multiplier) ÷ 2080.

2080 is the standard US full-time work year: 40 hours × 52 weeks. The overhead multiplier adds employer costs on top of salary — typically 1.25–1.40, covering payroll taxes, health benefits, retirement contributions, and allocated office and equipment costs.

Use the Meeting Cost Calculator to apply these figures instantly.

An example

Six employees, each earning $75,000 per year, in a 60-minute meeting with a 1.3× overhead multiplier:

Component	Calculation	Result
Hourly salary	$75,000 ÷ 2080	$36.06 / hr
Loaded rate	$36.06 × 1.3	$46.88 / hr
6 people, 1 hour	$46.88 × 6	$281.25

If that meeting recurs weekly, the annual cost is $281.25 × 52 ≈ $14,625 — for a single recurring one-hour slot.

What the overhead multiplier includes

The multiplier (sometimes called a burden rate or loaded labor rate) typically covers:

Employer payroll taxes — US Social Security + Medicare alone add ~7.65%
Health insurance — often $5,000–$15,000 per employee per year
Retirement contributions — 3–6% of salary for a typical 401k match
Office space — rent, utilities, facilities allocated per headcount
Software and equipment — laptops, licenses, IT support

A 1.3× multiplier (30% above salary) is conservative for most US office roles. Engineering and technical roles with expensive tooling often run 1.4–1.6×.

The hidden costs this doesn't capture

Salary plus overhead is the measurable cost. Two costs are harder to quantify but often larger:

Context-switching tax. Knowledge workers typically need 15–25 minutes to regain deep focus after an interruption. A one-hour meeting in the middle of a workday can consume 90–120 minutes of effective productive time per person.

Opportunity cost. What would those hours have produced? For product work, engineering, or client-facing roles, the value of uninterrupted work time is often far higher than the salary cost.

Some researchers argue that the true cost of a meeting is 2–4× the direct salary figure once these factors are included.

Common meeting types and their approximate costs

Meeting	Attendees	Duration	Avg salary	Approx cost
Daily standup	8	15 min	$85k	$55
Weekly team sync	8	60 min	$85k	$218
All-hands (50 ppl)	50	60 min	$90k	$1,407
Leadership quarterly	10	4 hr	$160k	$1,600

Figures use 1.3× overhead, 2080 work-hours/year. Illustrative only.

Questions worth asking before any recurring meeting

Who actually needs to be here? Every additional attendee multiplies the cost linearly.
Could this be async? A recorded update or written summary costs roughly zero and is consumed at each person's own pace.
What decision does this meeting produce? If no decision, the meeting may be a status report that belongs in a doc.
What's the shortest version of this meeting that achieves the outcome? Parkinson's Law: work expands to fill the time available. A 25-minute default often gets the same result as a 30-minute one.

How to reduce meeting costs

Shorten defaults — set calendar defaults to 25 or 50 minutes instead of 30 or 60
Trim invite lists — share notes with optional attendees instead of requiring presence
No-meeting blocks — designate mornings or specific days for deep work
Async standups — written or video updates instead of a daily sync
Hard stop — end at time even if the agenda isn't complete; incomplete items go to the next slot or an async thread