Meeting Cost Calculator
Watch the real-time dollar cost of a meeting tick up based on headcount and average hourly rate — a handy nudge to keep meetings short.
A one-hour meeting with five people isn't a one-hour cost — it's five hours of collective time, and that reframing is exactly what a meeting cost calculator is built to make visible. Most organizations track individual salaries carefully but almost never translate "we're having a meeting" into "we're spending this many dollars of combined time," which is part of why meetings are so easy to schedule casually and so hard to justify after the fact when someone finally does the math.
The calculation itself is straightforward multiplication — average hourly rate, times number of attendees, times meeting length — but the value isn't in the arithmetic being hard, it's in the number rarely getting calculated at all. Seeing a genuine dollar figure attached to a recurring one-hour status meeting with eight people tends to change how people think about whether that meeting actually needs to be an hour, or needs eight attendees, in a way that an abstract sense of "meetings take time" doesn't.
This tool keeps the calculation simple on purpose: enter an average hourly rate, the number of attendees, and the meeting length, and get an estimated cost. It's intentionally a rough estimate rather than a precise accounting tool — the point is to make the tradeoff visible in the moment you're deciding whether to schedule something, not to produce a number for a formal budget.
- Enter the number of people in the meeting.
- Enter the average hourly rate.
- Press "Start meeting" to begin the live cost counter.
- Press Reset when the meeting ends.
People × hourly rate × (elapsed seconds ÷ 3600) — a simple linear estimate.
Convert it first: divide annual salary by roughly 2,080 working hours per year to get an hourly rate.
No, the counter resets when you press Reset or leave the page.