Meeting cost calculator

How the meeting cost is calculated

The calculator uses the same arithmetic you would do on a napkin, just without the mistakes:

1. Hourly rate for each role. Hourly pay is used as entered. Annual salaries are divided by 2,080, which is 40 hours a week times 52 weeks.
2. Cost of the room per hour. Each role's hourly rate is multiplied by the number of people in it, and the rows are added up.
3. Overhead. That total is multiplied by the overhead multiplier (1.00 means wages only).
4. Per minute and per meeting. The hourly cost divided by 60 is the cost per minute; times the meeting length is the cost per meeting.
5. Per year. The cost per meeting times how many times it happens in a year: 260 for every workday, 52 for weekly, 26 for every two weeks, 12 for monthly, 4 for quarterly, and 1 for a one-off.

A worked example

Take a weekly one-hour team meeting with five team members paid $45 an hour and one manager on a $120,000 salary. The manager's hourly rate is $120,000 / 2,080 = about $57.69. The room costs 5 × $45 + $57.69 = $282.69 an hour, or about $4.71 a minute. One meeting costs $282.69, and 52 of them cost $14,700 a year. With the 1.43 benefits multiplier, that becomes about $404 a meeting and $21,021 a year. These are the numbers the calculator starts with, so you can see each step change as you edit them.

What the number leaves out

The result is the cost of people's time while they sit in the meeting. It does not count the time spent preparing, getting to and from a meeting room, or getting back into focused work afterwards, and it does not count the work that didn't get done instead. So it is a floor, not a ceiling. It is also a cost, not a verdict: a meeting that settles a decision in an hour can be the cheapest option. The point is to know the price when you choose.

What the overhead multiplier means

Salary is not the whole cost of an employee. Employers also pay for health insurance, retirement contributions, paid leave and payroll taxes. In the US Bureau of Labor Statistics' Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for June 2026, wages and salaries made up 70.0 percent of compensation costs for private-industry workers and benefits made up the remaining 30.0 percent. Dividing 1 by 0.70 gives about 1.43, which is the "With benefits" button.

That figure covers benefits only. Some finance teams use a larger multiplier to include office space, equipment and software. If your company has its own fully loaded cost rate, type it in instead. Benefit shares differ by country and employer, so outside the US, 1.43 is only a rough guide.

Ways to cut what your meetings cost

The formula has only three levers: how many people, how long, and how often. Every practical tip pulls one of them.

1. Make meetings shorter by default. Calendar apps default to 30 and 60 minutes, but nothing says your meeting has to fill the slot. Try 25 and 50 minutes, or 15 for a quick decision. Change the length in the calculator to see the saving: cutting an hour to 45 minutes saves a quarter of the cost, every time it repeats.
2. Invite the people who decide or contribute, and inform everyone else. Each extra person adds their full hourly rate. Mark people as optional and promise them the notes.
3. Move status updates to writing. Round-the-table updates are the easiest part of a meeting to replace with a short written update that people read when it suits them. Keep the meeting for discussion and decisions.
4. Send an agenda and end with decisions and owners. A meeting with a clear goal tends to finish sooner, and written minutes stop the same topic coming back next week. Our meeting minutes template gives you a format to copy, and the guide to taking meeting minutes covers what to write down.
5. Record the meeting so fewer people need to attend. If a transcript and notes will be there afterwards, the people who only need to know what happened can skip the meeting and read it in a few minutes. Always tell people you are recording and get their consent; recording laws vary by place.
6. Review recurring meetings regularly. Recurring meetings are where the yearly number gets big. Set the frequency to weekly or every workday and look at the yearly cost; then ask whether the meeting still needs to exist, or could happen half as often.

Meeting load is not a small issue. A Harvard Business Review article by Leslie Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley and Eunice Eun, "Stop the Meeting Madness" (2017), points to research finding that executives spend nearly 23 hours a week in meetings, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s.

Where Hark fits

Hark is a desktop app for Windows, Mac and Linux that records your meetings on your own computer, in any meeting app, without a bot joining the call. On Windows and Linux it records both your microphone and the other people on the call; on a Mac it records the microphone only. It transcribes the recording on your computer (English only), works out who spoke by their voice, and remembers people so it can name them in future meetings.

Recording, transcription and speaker recognition are free with no usage limits. A $12 a month subscription adds AI meeting notes written by Claude from the transcript text, which is the summary you would send to the people who didn't need to attend. New accounts get a 2-day preview of the AI features.

Embed this calculator on your site

Writing about meetings, productivity or HR? Paste this code into your page as HTML. It shows only the calculator, free, with a small link back here.

<iframe src="https://externalsoftware.com/hark/tools/meeting-cost-calculator/?embed=1" title="Meeting cost calculator" width="100%" height="820" style="border:0;max-width:760px" loading="lazy" allow="clipboard-write"></iframe>
<p style="font-size:14px"><a href="https://externalsoftware.com/hark/tools/meeting-cost-calculator/">Meeting cost calculator</a> from Hark</p>

Methodology and privacy

• Annual salaries are converted at 2,080 hours a year. Paid holidays, overtime and part-time schedules are not modeled.
• The yearly figure assumes the meeting happens every time it is scheduled (260 workdays a year for daily meetings).
• The overhead multiplier is applied to everyone equally. The 1.43 preset comes from the BLS June 2026 private-industry figures linked above.
• Currencies are labels only; nothing is converted between them.
• Everything is calculated in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to us. When you change a value, the numbers are written into the page address so the link you copy reproduces your result; anyone you send it to will see those numbers.

Related: our speaking rate calculator works out how long a talk takes and how long a recording takes to transcribe, and the guide to transcribing an audio recording to text compares the ways to get a transcript.