The daily standup is the most common meeting in tech. It's also the meeting people question least — "it's only 15 minutes." But 15 minutes × 5 people × 240 working days is 300 hours per year. That's 7.5 full work weeks of collective time. Let's look at what that actually costs.
The Math
For a typical 5-person engineering team with an average fully-loaded cost of $55/hour:
15 minutes × 5 people × 240 days = 300 hours/year. At $55/hour, that's $16,500 per year for one team's standup. If your company has 10 teams doing daily standups, that's $165,000 per year — the cost of two junior developers.
And that's the optimistic number. In reality, most standups run 20-25 minutes, not 15. People arrive late and the meeting starts 3-5 minutes behind. The actual time cost is often 30-40% higher than scheduled.
When Standups Run Long
A standup that averages 25 minutes instead of 15 costs $27,500/year for a 5-person team — a 67% increase. The usual culprits: people going into too much detail, solving problems in the standup instead of parking them, or the standup becoming a general discussion.
The original purpose of a standup is three questions per person: What did I do yesterday? What am I doing today? What's blocking me? At 1-2 minutes per person, a 5-person standup should be done in 10 minutes. If it consistently runs longer, the format has drifted.
The Real Question: Is It Worth It?
$16,500/year is significant, but the standup might still be worth it if it genuinely prevents miscommunication, catches blockers early, and keeps the team aligned. The problem is when the standup becomes ritual rather than functional — people attend because they're supposed to, not because it changes what they do.
Signs your standup is providing value: blockers get identified and resolved faster, team members adjust their work based on what others share, the meeting consistently ends in under 15 minutes.
Signs your standup is a cost center: people zone out while others talk, updates are generic ("working on the same thing as yesterday"), no one changes their plan based on the meeting, it consistently runs over time.
Alternatives That Cost Less
Async standup bots. Tools like Geekbot or Standuply post the three standup questions in Slack daily. People respond when they're ready. The team gets the same information at near-zero meeting cost. Only escalate to a synchronous call when someone is actually blocked.
3× per week instead of 5×. Many teams find that Monday-Wednesday-Friday standups capture 90% of the value at 60% of the cost. The two "off" days create space for deep work and most blockers surface within 24 hours anyway.
Walking standups with no chairs. If you keep the synchronous format, removing chairs (literally) keeps it short. Standing meetings run 25-30% shorter on average according to workplace research.
Calculate Your Standup Cost
Use our meeting cost calculator to see exactly what your standup costs. Set it to your team size, average rate, and actual duration (be honest — time it for a week). Then multiply by 240 working days. The yearly number is what you're investing in this daily ritual.
If the number feels right for the value you're getting, keep it. If it doesn't, try one of the alternatives for a month and see what happens. Most teams that switch to async standups report that nothing broke and they got hours back.