How much does a one-hour meeting cost?

It depends on who is in the room. 6 people on an average salary of $60,000 cost $256.60 for a one-hour meeting, or $4.28 a minute. That uses a loaded cost multiplier of 1.34, for employer payroll taxes, benefits, equipment and overhead, and 1,880 working hours a year. Held every week, the same meeting costs $12,060 a year.

How much do meetings cost a year?

Multiply the cost of one meeting by the number of times it meets: meetings per week times working weeks per year, which is 47 after 25 days of paid time off and holidays. With the calculator's defaults, a daily 15-minute stand-up of 8 people costs $20,100 a year and a weekly 90-minute planning meeting of 10 costs $30,150. Add up your recurring meetings the same way to get the yearly meeting bill.

Should I use salary or loaded cost?

Use loaded cost when you want to know what the company pays for the time. Salary leaves out employer payroll taxes, benefits, equipment and overhead, which add about 34% on top of a $60,000 salary in the employee cost calculator's example. To see the salary-only figure, set the multiplier to 1.

Why does the calculator divide by 1,880 hours, not 2,080?

Because a salary also pays for days off, when no meetings happen. 40 hours a week for 52 weeks is 2,080 paid hours; taking out 25 days of paid time off and holidays, which are example values you can change, leaves 1,880 working hours. Dividing by 2,080 would make each working hour look about 10% cheaper than it is.

How do I share the result?

Click Copy share link. The link carries only the numbers you entered, such as the attendees, salaries, multiplier, length and frequency, never a name, email or company, and opens the calculator with the same result. Print or save as PDF prints the calculator and its result without the site navigation.

Does the live timer keep running if I switch tabs?

Yes. The timer counts from the clock, not from screen updates, so it stays accurate in a background tab, and it stops only when you click Pause or Reset. It runs in your browser and sends nothing about the meeting anywhere.

Free tool

Meeting cost calculator, with a live timer

A meeting costs the sum of each attendee's hourly cost multiplied by its length, and a recurring meeting costs that amount every week it meets. Enter the attendees, their average salary and the length below to see the cost of one meeting and of the whole year, or start the live timer during the meeting.

This meeting cost calculator takes its loaded cost from the employee cost calculator, with tax rates checked October 23, 2026. No sign-up.

Calculate what your meeting costs

Change any number and the results update as you type. Start the timer when the meeting starts to watch the cost count up.

The meeting

Jump to the result

Who is in the room

Number of attendees

Average annual salary

Salaries

One averageEach attendee

Loaded cost multiplier

Default 1.34: payroll taxes, benefits, equipment and overhead on top of a $60,000 salary in the employee cost calculator. Use 1 for salary alone.

Length and frequency

How often it meets

One-offWeeklyDaily

Meeting length

Meetings like this per week

1 for once a week, 2 for twice a week.

Working time and loaded cost assumptions

Hourly cost is salary times the multiplier, divided by the hours people actually work. Both defaults come from the employee cost calculator's worked example, built on 2026 federal payroll taxes, benefits from the BLS and example values for time off, equipment and overhead. Source: SSA, IRS Publication 15, IRS Topic 759 and BLS ECEC, Table 1. Checked October 23, 2026.

Hours per week

Paid time off and holidays

Example: 15 days of paid time off and 10 holidays.

That leaves 1,880 working hours and 47 working weeks a year: a recurring meeting is counted in every working week.

What it costs

Live meeting cost timer

$4.28 a minute

$0.000:00:00

Scheduled: 60 minutes, $256.60 if it ends on time

Cost of this meeting

$256.60

6 people × 60 minutes

Per minute: $4.28
Per year: $12,060
Per attendee hour: $42.77

Weekly, once a week for 47 working weeks: 282 person-hours a year.

Work out one person's full cost in the employee cost calculator

The formula

How is meeting cost calculated?

Add up each attendee's hourly cost and multiply by the length of the meeting in hours. An attendee's hourly cost is their salary times a loaded cost multiplier, which adds payroll taxes, benefits and overhead, divided by the hours they actually work in a year.

The formulas

Hourly cost of an attendee = annual salary × loaded cost multiplier ÷ working hours per year

Meeting cost = the attendees' hourly costs added up × length in hours

Annual cost = meeting cost × meetings per week × working weeks per year

Working hours leave out paid time off and holidays, because a salary pays for those days but no meetings happen on them. With 40 hours a week and 25 days off, that is 1,880 hours over 47 working weeks, not 2,080. The multiplier of 1.34 is the employee cost calculator's example for a $60,000 salary, rounded to two decimals.

Worked example: a weekly 60-minute meeting with 6 people

Salaries: 6 attendees × $60,000 = $360,000 a year.
Loaded cost: $360,000 × 1.34 = $482,400 a year.
Working hours: 40 × 52 - 25 days × 8 hours = 1,880 a year.
Hourly cost of the room: $482,400 ÷ 1,880 = $256.60, or $42.77 per attendee.
This meeting: $256.60 × 1 hour = $256.60, or $4.28 a minute.
Every week: $256.60 × 1 × 47 working weeks = $12,060 a year, for 282 person-hours.

At salary alone, with a multiplier of 1, the same meeting would show $191.49: about a quarter less than what the company actually pays for the time.

Recurring meetings

What does a recurring meeting cost per year?

Multiply the cost of one meeting by the number of times it meets in a year. A weekly 60-minute meeting of 6 people on an average $60,000 salary costs $256.60 each time and $12,060 a year, because it meets in each of 47 working weeks. Short daily meetings add up fastest.

Four common recurring meetings, per year

With the calculator's defaults: an average salary of $60,000, a loaded cost multiplier of 1.34 and 1,880 working hours over 47 working weeks a year.

Meeting	Attendees	Length	Per week	Per meeting	Per year	Person-hours a year
Daily stand-up	8	15 min	5	$85.53	$20,100	470
Weekly team meeting	6	60 min	1	$256.60	$12,060	282
Weekly one-to-one	2	30 min	1	$42.77	$2,010	47
Weekly planning meeting	10	90 min	1	$641.49	$30,150	705
All four					$64,320	1,504

The daily stand-up is the shortest meeting in the table, but it meets 5 times a week with 8 people, so it costs $20,100 a year, more than the weekly team meeting. Put any of these into the calculator above with your own salaries to see your figures.

Cut the cost

How can you cut meeting cost?

Change one of three things: who attends, how long it lasts or how often it meets. Meeting cost moves in direct proportion to each, so removing a third of the attendees cuts a third of the cost, every week the meeting runs.

Invite fewer people

Invite the people who decide or do the work, and send notes to everyone else. Taking the weekly team meeting from 6 to 4 people saves $4,020 a year.

Shorten the default length

Set 25 or 45 minutes as the default instead of 30 or 60, and keep the agenda to what fits. Cutting the weekly team meeting from 60 to 45 minutes saves $3,015 a year.

Move updates to writing

Status updates work well as a written note that people read when it suits them; keep the meeting for decisions. Replacing two of the five weekly stand-ups of 8 people with a written update saves $8,040 a year.

End on time

Run the live timer: the bar turns amber when the meeting passes its scheduled length. Ten minutes over in the weekly team meeting, every week, costs $2,010 a year.

Time in meetings

How much time does your team actually spend in meetings?

A calendar shows the meetings people accepted, not the hours they spent in them. Intelogos shows time spent in meeting and messaging apps such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, grouped in its Communication time category, next to the time spent on every other kind of work.

Intelogos is a workforce analytics platform that shows how work time is spent across apps and websites, without screenshots or keystroke logging, and lets managers ask questions about it in plain language. Communication also includes chat and email, so read it as time spent communicating, not a count of meetings. Here is what its workforce analytics shows.

Meeting apps in their own category
Every tool Intelogos records belongs to a time category. Communication covers messaging, email, calls and customer chat, such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Slack, and you can move any tool into or out of it on the Tools page.
Time categories
The Time Categories chart
The Time Categories chart and table on the Dashboard and Profile pages show how tracked time splits across Communication, Development, Design and the other categories, for a team or one person. Click a row to see which tools make up the time.
Dashboard
Calls aren't mistaken for idle time
Communication tools have their own idle threshold, so you can give someone listening in a video call more time before the call is flagged as idle: 20 to 30 minutes suits typical meetings, and 60 minutes suits teams whose meetings often run longer than 30.
Idle time settings
Meetings away from the computer
A meeting in a room shows up as idle time, because the computer sees no input. With desktop agents, you can allow offline meetings tracking, so people can mark those idle periods as offline meetings.
Offline meetings

Intelogos doesn't take screenshots. Intelogos doesn't record what people type; it records only whether keyboard or mouse input happened.

See where your team's paid hours go See workforce analytics

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