Every meeting has a price tag. Not the conference room booking or the coffee — the salary cost of every person sitting in that room, doing nothing else. Most companies have no idea what that number is. When they find out, it's uncomfortable.
The Basic Meeting Cost Formula
Meeting cost = Number of attendees × Average hourly rate × Duration in hours. That's it. Simple multiplication that almost nobody does.
Here's what it looks like in practice. An employee earning $80,000 per year has a fully-loaded hourly cost of roughly $50/hour (including benefits, overhead, and taxes — typically 1.25-1.4× base salary). Put 6 of those employees in a room for 1 hour and the meeting costs $300. Do that twice a week and you're spending $28,800 per year on a single recurring meeting.
Where the Money Actually Goes
Research from various workplace studies consistently finds that the average professional spends between 25-35% of their working hours in meetings. For managers, it's often 50% or more. Senior executives can spend up to 70% of their time in meetings.
That means for a mid-level employee earning $80,000, roughly $20,000-$28,000 of their annual salary goes to sitting in meetings. For a VP earning $200,000, it could be $100,000+ worth of time — and that's before counting the opportunity cost of what they could have been doing instead.
The Hidden Multiplier: Context Switching
The salary math is just the direct cost. Research on attention and productivity suggests that it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully refocus after an interruption. Every meeting fragments someone's day, and those fragments have their own cost.
A 30-minute meeting in the middle of a focused work block doesn't cost 30 minutes — it costs closer to 60-75 minutes when you account for preparation, context switching, and recovery time. This is why many engineers and designers report that a day with 3 scattered meetings feels like a day where they got nothing done.
Meeting Cost at Scale
For a 100-person company with an average salary of $70,000 (~$44/hour fully loaded):
- Daily standup, 10 people, 15 min: ~$26,400/year
- Weekly team sync, 8 people, 1 hour: ~$16,900/year
- Monthly all-hands, 100 people, 1 hour: ~$52,800/year
- Weekly 1-on-1s across org, ~50 meetings, 30 min each: ~$112,200/year
That's over $200,000 per year on just four types of recurring meetings. Most companies have dozens more. When organizations actually audit their meeting costs, the total typically comes to 15-25% of total payroll — often the largest hidden line item in the budget.
What To Do About It
The goal isn't zero meetings — some meetings are genuinely valuable. The goal is making the cost visible so teams can make informed decisions. When someone sees that their weekly brainstorm costs $500 per session, they might decide to make it biweekly, reduce the invite list, or replace it with an async document.
Start by calculating the cost of your top 5 recurring meetings using our meeting cost calculator. The numbers alone usually trigger the right conversations. Most teams find they can cut 20-30% of meeting time without losing anything meaningful.
The Bottom Line
Meetings aren't free. Every meeting is a budget decision — you're choosing to spend salary dollars on synchronous discussion instead of individual output. Sometimes that's the right call. But you can't make that call if you don't know the price. Calculate your meeting costs now and see where the money is going.