Meeting cost calculator

    Employees cost more than their salary. Employer National Insurance, pension contributions, and office overhead typically add around 30% on top. Enable this for a more realistic figure.
    hours
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    This meeting costs
    Per attendee
    If this meeting is weekly, it costs your organisation

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    How this is calculated

    This calculator converts each attendee's annual salary into an hourly rate, multiplies it by the meeting's length, and sums that across everyone in the room — giving you the real organisational cost of the time spent, not just a rough guess.

    How the hourly-rate conversion works

    Each attendee's annual salary is divided by 2,080 — the standard working-hours-per-year assumption (40 hours a week × 52 weeks) — to get an hourly rate. That rate is multiplied by the meeting's duration (in hours) and by the number of attendees to give the total meeting cost. Per-attendee cost is simply the total divided by the number of people. For example, a £45,000 salary works out to roughly £21.63 an hour, so an 8-person, 1-hour meeting at that average salary costs around £173.

    What the employer-costs toggle adds

    The "Include employer costs" toggle adds 30% on top of the salary-only figure. A salary alone understates what an employee actually costs an organisation — employer National Insurance, pension contributions, and a share of office overhead typically add around 30% on top. Switching this on gives a more realistic full-cost figure; a £45,000 salary effectively costs an organisation closer to £58,500 once these are included.

    Why the weekly annualised figure matters

    The "if this meeting is weekly" figure multiplies the single-meeting cost by 52 to show what a recurring meeting costs over a full year. This is the number that tends to surprise people most — a one-hour team meeting that feels routine and low-cost can easily represent tens of thousands of pounds of organisational time once you account for how often it repeats.

    Assumptions and limitations

    This calculator assumes a standard 2,080-hour working year (40 hours × 52 weeks) and a single average salary applied across all attendees — it doesn't account for part-time hours, holiday allowance, seniority differences between attendees, or preparation and follow-up time outside the meeting itself. Treat the result as a useful order-of-magnitude figure rather than a precise payroll calculation.