When you calculate meeting costs, the biggest mistake is using base salary. An employee earning $80,000 doesn't cost your company $80,000. The real number — the fully loaded cost — includes benefits, payroll taxes, equipment, office space, and overhead. It's typically 1.25× to 1.4× base salary, sometimes higher.
What "Fully Loaded" Includes
The fully loaded cost of an employee covers everything the company spends to keep that person working. Beyond gross salary, this includes employer-side payroll taxes (Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance), health insurance premiums, retirement contributions like 401(k) matching, paid time off, equipment and software licenses, office space per employee, training and development, and HR and administrative overhead.
For a US-based employee earning $80,000 base salary, the breakdown typically looks something like this: payroll taxes add roughly $6,100, health insurance runs $6,000-$12,000 per year depending on plan type, 401(k) match adds $2,400-$4,000, PTO costs around $6,150 (accounting for the 15-20 days they're paid but not working), and equipment plus overhead adds another $3,000-$8,000. That pushes the total to roughly $100,000-$110,000 — or about 1.3× the base salary.
Quick Multipliers by Role Type
If you don't want to calculate every line item, use these multipliers as a reasonable estimate. For tech employees in the US (engineers, designers, PMs), use 1.3-1.4× due to higher benefits packages and expensive tooling. For general office workers, 1.25-1.3× is typical. For European employees, use 1.3-1.5× since employer-side social contributions are generally higher. For contractors and freelancers, the multiplier is 1.0× — their rate is their rate, no additional overhead.
Converting to Hourly Rate
To get the hourly rate for meeting cost calculations, take the fully loaded annual cost and divide by actual working hours per year. A standard year has 2,080 work hours (52 weeks × 40 hours), but after holidays and PTO, the real number is closer to 1,880 hours.
So an employee with a fully loaded cost of $104,000 has a true hourly cost of about $55/hour. That's the number you should plug into a meeting cost calculator — not the $38/hour you'd get from dividing their base salary by 2,080.
Why This Matters for Meeting Costs
Using base salary instead of fully loaded cost understates your meeting expenses by 25-40%. A weekly 1-hour meeting with 8 people at $38/hour (base) looks like $14,600/year. At $55/hour (fully loaded), it's $21,100/year — a $6,500 difference from one meeting. Across all your recurring meetings, the gap adds up to tens of thousands.
The fully loaded rate is the economically honest number. It represents the actual resources consumed when a person sits in a meeting instead of doing other work. Use our meeting cost calculator with the fully loaded rate to see what your meetings actually cost.