Calculate the true cost of your meetings. Plan smarter, meet less, save more.
The average company wastes $25,000/employee/year on unnecessary meetings. See what your meetings really cost.
This gives people a 5-minute buffer between meetings and naturally shortens discussions. Google does this company-wide. A 10-minute reduction across all meetings can save 15–20% of meeting costs.
If you can’t feed the meeting with two pizzas, there are too many people. Every additional attendee increases cost AND decreases productivity — more opinions, slower decisions.
Before scheduling, write out the meeting’s goal in one sentence. If the goal is just sharing information (not making a decision or brainstorming), it should probably be an async update.
If nobody in the room can actually make a decision on the topic, the meeting will end with “let’s circle back” — the most expensive two words in business.
Most people dramatically underestimate how much time they spend in meetings. Track it for a week, multiply by your rate, and you’ll never schedule an unnecessary meeting again.
Meetings are one of the largest hidden expenses in every organization. While rent, salaries, and software subscriptions are tracked to the penny, the cost of pulling five, ten, or twenty people into a room for an hour rarely gets a second thought. But it should.
The average employee spends 31 hours per month in meetings they consider unproductive. For a company with just 50 employees averaging $60/hour in total compensation, that translates to over $5.5 million per year in meeting time alone. Companies with 5,000+ employees routinely waste over $100 million annually.
And the true cost is even higher than the hourly rate suggests. A 30-minute meeting doesn't just cost 30 minutes of productivity. Research shows that the context-switching cost adds 15–23 minutes of ramp-up time before AND after each meeting. That "quick 30-minute sync" actually consumes 60–90 minutes of deep work time.
Remote work dramatically increased meeting frequency. Studies show that the average number of meetings per employee increased by 252% after 2020, while the average meeting duration dropped only slightly. The net effect: more total time in meetings than ever before, with many employees spending 50% or more of their workweek on video calls.
The formula is straightforward: take each attendee's hourly rate (salary ÷ 2,080 hours/year), multiply by the number of attendees and the meeting duration, then multiply by the meeting frequency to see annual impact. Our calculator handles this automatically, but understanding the math helps you make the case to leadership.
For a more accurate picture, multiply hourly rates by 1.3–1.5× to account for benefits, taxes, equipment, and office space. A $75/hour employee actually costs the company $97–$112/hour in fully-loaded compensation.