How much does a meeting actually cost? The formula

Nobody puts a price tag on a meeting invite, which is exactly why calendars fill up with them. You can put a rough, defensible number on any meeting in under a minute, and once you've done it a few times you start doing it in your head before you hit "accept."

The formula

For each attendee: take their annual salary, divide by the number of working hours in a year, then add overhead.

Cost per hour per person = (annual salary ÷ 2,080 hours) × 1.25

2,080 comes from a standard 260 working days × 8 hours. The 1.25 multiplier (25% overhead) accounts for benefits, payroll tax, equipment and office costs that sit on top of base salary — loaded cost typically runs 20-40% above salary, so 25% is a conservative middle estimate. Sum that figure across everyone in the room, multiply by the meeting's length in hours, and you have the cost.

Worked example

Four people, one hour: $300.49. That's the real price of a status update that could have been a Slack message.

Why bother calculating this

Salaries are invisible on a calendar. A meeting with eight people looks the same as a meeting with two — same green block, same 30 minutes. Putting a dollar figure next to it changes the conversation: it's much easier to argue for cutting the invite list from ten to four when you can say "that's an $800 meeting" instead of just "it feels big."

Shortcuts for estimating without exact salaries

• Don't know someone's exact pay? A role-based guess (junior $70-90k, senior $120-150k, manager $140-180k, exec $200k+) is close enough — this is a directional number, not payroll accounting.
• For a quick mental version: salary in thousands, divided by 2, is roughly the hourly rate with overhead included. $120k → ~$60/hr. It's not exact but it's fast.
• Recurring meetings compound fast: multiply the per-meeting cost by how often it happens. A $300 weekly status meeting is about $15,600 a year.