All-Hands Meeting Cost Calculator
An all-hands or town hall puts the whole company in one meeting at once — so the cost scales fast. See what a single session costs and what it adds up to across a year.
That annual cost equals…
Run the numbers on smaller meetings too
All-hands are only part of the picture. Use the full calculator for team meetings, or see what a daily standup costs across the year.
Open the Meeting Cost Calculator →Why all-hands meetings cost so much
The cost of any meeting is length × number of attendees × loaded hourly rate. All-hands meetings max out the middle term: instead of five or ten people, the entire company is in the room. At 150 people, a single hour is 150 paid hours — more than three and a half full work-weeks of time, spent in sixty minutes.
That doesn't make all-hands a bad idea. Alignment, transparency, and shared context are genuinely valuable and hard to deliver any other way. The point is to treat that hour as the significant investment it is, and hold the content to a matching standard.
Getting the most from an expensive hour
- Keep it tight — a focused 30–40 minutes beats a rambling hour at this headcount.
- Make most of the content relevant to most of the room; send niche updates separately.
- Record it so people in other time zones aren't forced into a live session.
- Move detailed Q&A to a written channel where answers are searchable.
- Open with the most important message — attention is highest in the first few minutes.
For more, see our meeting optimization guide and reducing meeting costs playbook.
Frequently Asked Questions
A one-hour all-hands for 150 people at a $70/hour loaded rate costs about $10,500 in paid time per session — roughly $126,000 a year if held monthly, before preparation and lost focus time.
They can be — alignment, transparency, and culture have real value that's hard to replicate asynchronously. Keep them tight, make the content broadly relevant, and record them so non-attendees aren't forced to join live.
Shorten it, make parts optional, record it for async viewing, and move detailed Q&A to written channels. Trimming a monthly 60-minute all-hands to 40 minutes saves a third of the cost.