How to Calculate the True Cost of Your Recurring Meetings Annually

A weekly one-hour meeting with six people at $70 per hour average costs $420 per week. Over 50 weeks, that's $21,000 per year - on a single meeting. Most managers have 5 to 10 recurring meetings on their calendar. The annual total can easily exceed $100,000 in meeting costs for one person's calendar alone.

The formula is simple: (number of attendees) x (average hourly cost) x (meeting duration in hours) x (frequency per year). But nobody does this math because meetings feel free.

Here's how to audit your meeting calendar. Open your calendar and list every recurring meeting. For each one, note the attendee count, estimated average salary, duration, and frequency. Run each through Meeting Cost Calculator and write down the annual cost.

Sort by annual cost, highest first. The top three meetings on your list probably account for more than half of your total meeting spend. These are the ones worth scrutinizing first.

For each expensive meeting, ask three questions. First: what decisions or outcomes does this meeting produce? If the answer is vague, the meeting might not be necessary. Second: could the same outcome happen asynchronously? Many status updates and information-sharing meetings can be replaced by written updates. Third: does everyone in the meeting need to be there? Removing two people from a $21,000 annual meeting saves $7,000.

The goal isn't zero meetings - it's informed meetings. When you know what each meeting costs, you can make rational decisions about which ones justify their price tag. Meeting Cost Calculator makes the cost real instead of abstract, and that changes how teams think about their time.