How Much Do Meetings Cost?
Meetings feel free because no invoice arrives — but every one bills the salaries of everyone in the room. Here's how to put a real number on it, what an average meeting costs, and how to bring that number down.
The simple formula
The cost of a meeting is the value of the time everyone spends in it:
So a one-hour meeting with six people at a fully loaded rate of $70 an hour costs about $420. Make it recurring — say weekly — and that's roughly $21,800 a year for a single standing meeting. You can run your own numbers in the meeting cost calculator.
Enter your duration, attendees, and pay rate to see the single-meeting and annual cost instantly.
Open the Meeting Cost Calculator →Why "loaded" cost matters
Base salary understates what an employee actually costs. The loaded (or fully burdened) cost adds benefits, payroll taxes, equipment, software, and overhead — usually 1.25× to 1.4× base pay. When you're estimating what a meeting costs the business, the loaded rate is the honest figure to use. To turn a salary into an hourly rate to plug in, use our salary to hourly calculator.
Average meeting costs by type
These are illustrative figures using a $70/hour loaded rate. Your numbers will differ with seniority and team size, but the orders of magnitude are typical.
| Meeting type | Typical size & length | Per meeting | Per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daily standup | 8 people, 15 min | ~$140 | ~$36,400 |
| Weekly team sync | 6 people, 60 min | ~$420 | ~$21,800 |
| 1:1 meeting | 2 people, 30 min | ~$70 | ~$3,600 |
| Project kickoff | 10 people, 90 min | ~$1,050 | one-off |
| Monthly all-hands | 150 people, 60 min | ~$10,500 | ~$126,000 |
Want a tool for a specific format? Try the standup cost calculator or the all-hands cost calculator.
What drives the cost up
- Headcount — the biggest lever. Every extra attendee adds their full hourly rate.
- Seniority — a room of directors costs several times a room of juniors.
- Frequency — recurring meetings quietly compound; a small weekly meeting outcosts a big one-off.
- Hidden time — prep, scheduling, and the context-switching tax on focused work before and after.
How to bring it down
You don't cut meeting cost by banning meetings — you cut it by making each one earn its price. Trim the invite list to people who'll act on the outcome, default to 25 or 50 minutes instead of 30 or 60, and move pure status updates to writing. Our reducing meeting costs guide has the full playbook, and the "could this have been an email?" check helps decide meeting-by-meeting.
For the research behind the headlines — how much time and money meetings waste across the economy — see our meeting cost statistics.
Frequently Asked Questions
Multiply the meeting length in hours by the number of attendees and their average loaded hourly rate. A 1-hour meeting with 6 people at $70/hour loaded costs about $420. Recurring meetings multiply that by how often they happen per year.
It varies with attendee count and seniority, but a typical hour-long meeting of 5–8 mid-level employees costs roughly $300–$600 in loaded salary time. Recurring weekly meetings of that size run into the tens of thousands per year.
The loaded (fully burdened) cost adds benefits, payroll taxes, equipment, and overhead to base salary — typically 1.25× to 1.4× base pay. It's the right figure for estimating what a meeting costs the business.