Multiply attendees, duration and average hourly cost to see what a meeting actually costs, and what a standing meeting costs by the year.
Meetings are the only corporate spend routinely approved by calendar invite. Enter the number of people, the length in hours and an average hourly cost, and the calculator prices the session the way finance would price anything else.
Last reviewed 3 July 2026 · Free and ungated
For the decisions your meetings are circling, a client brief to the Global Board brings confidential input from selected senior operators before you commit.
Review this before committingMeeting cost = people × hours × average hourly cost. How our tools work
Ten people in a two-hour steering meeting at an average fully loaded cost of €150 an hour comes to 10 × 2 × €150 = €3,000. Run weekly across forty-eight working weeks, that one recurring invite costs €144,000 a year: the price of a senior hire, spent without anyone ever approving it as spend.
Salary divided by working hours understates the true rate. A fully loaded hourly cost includes employer taxes, benefits, office and equipment overhead, and is typically 1.3 to 1.7 times the salary-derived figure. For senior attendees, the honest rate is higher still, because their scarce hours have alternative uses worth more than their payroll cost.
To be fair to the other side of the ledger: a meeting that genuinely aligns twelve people, kills a doomed initiative or unblocks a stalled decision can repay its cost many times over. The calculator cannot see quality. Its job is to establish that the session has a price, so the agenda can be judged against it, and so the meetings that exist only because they existed last quarter lose their immunity.
Average hourly cost flattens a room that usually contains both a graduate and a group director, and the output says nothing about whether the meeting should happen. Price the recurring meetings first; that is where the annual numbers get uncomfortable.
Estimate a weighted average from the seniority mix rather than a single guess. If the room is mostly senior, err high. The calculator becomes more honest, not less, as the rate rises.
The point is that recurring meetings are unpriced spend. Once a weekly session is visibly a six-figure annual cost, the owner can be asked the same question any budget line gets: what does it return, and what is the cheaper alternative?
For decision meetings, the meeting cost is usually trivial next to the decision at stake, which is the real argument for better preparation. Spending €3,000 of room time on a €2 million commitment without a structured brief is the false economy worth fixing.