Every engineering org has the meeting nobody would approve as a purchase order. A weekly sync with eight people, an hour long, that's been on the calendar since before half the attendees joined. Nobody would sign off on a $40,000-a-year line item for it. But nobody has to, because the cost never shows up on an invoice.
This post walks through how to calculate what a meeting costs, the part most calculators leave out, and what the numbers look like for a typical engineering team. If you want to skip the math, the Meeting Cost Calculator does it for you, including a live meter you can leave running during the meeting.
The basic formula
The cost of a meeting is the hourly cost of everyone in it, multiplied by how long it runs:
hourly cost (per person) = annual salary × overhead multiplier ÷ 2,080
meeting cost = sum of everyone's hourly cost × length in hours
Two of those numbers need explaining.
2,080 is the standard count of working hours in a year: 40 hours × 52 weeks. It ignores vacation and holidays, which makes the hourly figure slightly low. That's fine for a conservative estimate.
The overhead multiplier covers what an employee costs beyond salary: benefits, payroll taxes, equipment, software, office space. A range of roughly 1.25 to 1.4 is a common rule of thumb. The calculator uses 1.3 and lets you turn it off to see salary-only cost.
A worked example
Take a fairly normal engineering meeting: four senior engineers at about $195,000, one engineering manager at $220,000, and one product manager at $175,000, for an hour.
- Combined salaries: $1,175,000
- With overhead: $1,175,000 × 1.3 = $1,527,500
- Per hour: $1,527,500 ÷ 2,080 = about $734
So that one-hour meeting costs roughly $734. Run it weekly and it's about $36,700 a year. That's before the part most people forget.
The hidden cost: getting back into focus
A meeting doesn't end when the call does. For anyone doing deep work, there's a ramp back up: reopening the code, rebuilding the mental model, remembering where they were. Gloria Mark's research at UC Irvine on interrupted work is the source of the widely quoted figure that it takes about 23 minutes to get fully back into an interrupted task.
The calculator adds that refocus time once per engineer per meeting. It doesn't add it for managers, whose days are already built around meetings. For the example above:
- Four engineers × 23 minutes of refocus at about $122/hour each ≈ $187
- Total: $734 + $187 = about $921 per meeting
- Weekly for a year: about $46,000
That refocus cost is why a 30-minute meeting in the middle of an engineer's afternoon often costs more than the 30 minutes on the calendar suggests. It splits one block of focus time into two shorter ones, and neither may be long enough for hard problems.
The standup math
Short recurring meetings add up fastest, because they happen every day. A 15-minute daily standup with eight engineers at $195,000:
- Eight engineers with overhead: about $975/hour
- 15 minutes: about $244 per standup
- 250 working days: about $61,000 a year, before refocus time
Standups can easily be worth that. The point isn't that they're too expensive. It's that $61,000 is a budget, and a budget deserves a purpose: unblocking people, not reciting yesterday's tickets.
What to do with the number
The number isn't an argument to cancel every meeting. Some of the most valuable hours a team spends are in rooms together. It's a way to make the trade-off visible, so you can ask better questions:
- Does everyone need to be here? Removing one senior engineer from a weekly hour-long meeting saves about $6,000 a year in direct cost, plus their refocus time.
- Could this be async? Status updates usually can. Decisions with real disagreement usually can't.
- Is the length real? Calendars default to 30 and 60 minutes. A 25- or 50-minute meeting leaves a gap before the next one.
- Where in the day is it? A meeting at 9:30 or 4:30 costs less focus than one at 2:00, because it doesn't split the afternoon.
- Does it end with decisions? If a meeting costs $900, it should produce something worth $900: a decision, an unblock, a shared understanding that saves rework.
Using the calculator
The Meeting Cost Calculator takes about thirty seconds:
- Add attendees by role and count. Salaries prefill with rough US tech figures, and every row is editable, so set them to your company's numbers or your region's.
- Set the length and how often it repeats. The yearly figure is usually the one that changes minds.
- Leave overhead and refocus time on for the realistic number, or turn them off for the conservative one.
- Press Start meeting for a live dollar meter. Putting it on the shared screen at the start of a meeting is the fastest way to end a meeting early.
- Copy the one-line summary into the calendar invite, so the cost is visible to everyone who accepts it.
It also converts the cost into coffees, pizzas, and NAT Gateway hours, because sometimes "this meeting cost 37 pizzas" lands better than a dollar figure.
If the meeting survives the math, make it a good one. For the ones that don't, there's always Meeting Buzzword Bingo.