How Much Does a Meeting Actually Cost?
Multiply attendees by their hourly cost by the duration. A one-hour meeting with eight mid-level staff costs a few hundred pounds.
In short
A meeting costs the combined hourly cost of everyone in it, multiplied by its length, plus the time people spend preparing and switching back afterwards. Eight people on 40,000 salaries in a one-hour meeting costs roughly 200 in salary alone, and closer to 300 once employer costs are included. A recurring weekly meeting multiplies that by 50.
Meetings are the largest unmeasured cost in most organisations. Nobody signs them off, nothing appears in a budget, and the expense is entirely real.
The calculation
Cost equals the sum of each attendee’s hourly cost, multiplied by the duration.
To get an hourly cost:
- Divide annual salary by the hours actually worked in a year. That is not 2,080. After 25 days of leave and 8 bank holidays, a 37.5-hour week gives roughly 1,700 hours.
- Add employer costs. Employer National Insurance, pension contributions and overheads typically add 25 to 30 percent on top.
A 40,000 salary works out at about 23.50 an hour in salary terms, and roughly 30 an hour as a true cost to the organisation.
A worked example
A weekly team meeting, one hour, eight attendees:
- Six people on 40,000: 6 × 30 = 180 an hour
- One manager on 60,000: about 45 an hour
- One senior manager on 80,000: about 60 an hour
Total: about 285 an hour.
Held weekly for a year, allowing for holidays, that is roughly 13,000. It is a meaningful budget line that nobody ever approved, reviewed or renewed.
The costs the arithmetic misses
Preparation. If three people each spend an hour getting ready, add three hours of cost before anyone has spoken.
Follow-up. Notes, actions, and the messages afterwards clarifying what was actually decided.
Context switching. The largest hidden cost and the hardest to price. Research on interrupted work consistently finds that returning to focused work after an interruption takes considerably longer than the interruption itself.
A one-hour meeting at 11am rarely costs an hour of anyone’s productive capacity. It costs the hour, plus the twenty minutes beforehand when starting anything substantial feels pointless, plus the time afterwards spent getting back into the work that was interrupted.
The alternative use. The hour spent by eight people had other uses. The meeting is only worth holding if it beat them.
What the number is good for
Not banning meetings. Meetings do several things that written communication does badly: resolving genuine disagreement, making decisions with real trade-offs, building working relationships, and handling anything sensitive or personal.
The figure is useful for three specific questions.
Does this need everyone? Halving the attendee list halves the cost immediately. Most large recurring meetings contain several people attending only to stay informed, which a written summary does better, faster and far more cheaply.
Does this need to be an hour? Meetings expand to fill the slot booked for them. Scheduling 25 or 50 minutes instead of 30 or 60 reclaims real time and leaves gaps between back-to-back sessions, which people need more than they admit.
Does this need to be weekly? A recurring meeting outlives its usefulness far longer than a one-off does, because cancelling it requires somebody to actively decide to, and nobody owns that decision. The default is continuation, and defaults win.
Cheaper alternatives that work
- A written update for anything purely informational. It costs the writer time and saves everyone else theirs, and it stays searchable afterwards.
- A decision document circulated in advance, with the meeting existing only to resolve the points people disagreed with in the comments.
- A shorter meeting with fewer people, followed by a written summary to the wider group.
- No meeting at all, where the answer is already clear and the meeting exists only to confirm it out loud.
Making the number visible
Some teams add an estimated cost to recurring calendar invites. It prompts a different conversation, because it converts a vague sense that there are too many meetings into a figure somebody has to defend out loud.
Used constantly it becomes wallpaper and people stop seeing it. Used once a year on the standing meetings, during a review of what the team actually does with its time, it reliably removes at least one of them and shortens two more.
Who should be in the room
A useful discipline is to require a reason for each attendee, written next to their name. People fall into three groups: those who will contribute to the decision, those who must act on it, and those who simply want to know the outcome.
Only the first group needs to be there for the whole thing. The second can join for the relevant part. The third needs a summary, not an hour.
The honest framing
A meeting costing 285 is not automatically wasteful. A decision worth 50,000 made properly in an hour is excellent value, and a difficult conversation handled well face to face is worth more than any arithmetic can show.
The problem is not that meetings cost money. It is that the cost is invisible, so nobody ever compares it against the value. Working the figure out once for your regular meetings takes ten minutes, and it changes how the calendar looks afterwards.
Common questions
How do I work out someone's hourly cost?
Divide annual salary by the hours actually worked in a year, roughly 1,700 after holiday and bank holidays, then add 25 to 30 percent for employer National Insurance, pension and overheads. A 40,000 salary is about 23.50 an hour in salary and closer to 30 in total cost.
Does the cost include preparation time?
It should. A meeting that needs an hour of preparation from three people has consumed three extra hours before it started. Context switching afterwards adds more, since returning to focused work after an interruption takes substantially longer than the interruption itself.
Is showing the cost in the invite a good idea?
It can be, used sparingly. Adding an estimated cost to a recurring meeting invite prompts a genuine conversation about whether it needs everyone or needs to be weekly. Used constantly it becomes background noise that nobody reads.
Sources
Every factual claim above traces to one of these. Follow them rather than taking this article's word for it.
- Rates and thresholds for employers HM Revenue and Customs
- Holiday entitlement GOV.UK
- Household expenditure Office for National Statistics
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