The formula

Cost = Σ (annual salary ÷ 2,080 × loading factor) × meeting hours

Three parts, each of which people get wrong. The 2,080 is the standard working year: 40 hours × 52 weeks. The loading factor converts salary into what the employee actually costs the organisation. And the hours must include the whole invite list, not the people who spoke.

Why salary alone understates it by a third

An employee costs more than their salary. Employer payroll taxes and social contributions, health insurance, pension or retirement contributions, paid leave, equipment, software licences and office space are all real costs of having that person available for an hour. Standard practice is to multiply salary by a loading factor of 1.25 to 1.40, with 1.3 a reasonable default for a knowledge-work role.

So for an average salary of 75,000:

• Hourly salary: 75,000 ÷ 2,080 = 36.06
• Fully loaded hourly: 36.06 × 1.3 = 46.88

A worked example that should be uncomfortable

Eight people, one hour, average salary 75,000:

Now make it recurring. A weekly one-hour meeting with eight attendees, running 48 weeks a year after holidays:

375 × 48 = 18,000 per year

That is a meaningful line item — roughly a quarter of a salaried role — committed to a single repeating slot that nobody ever formally approved. The reframe that changes behaviour is this: if someone asked you to sign off 18,000 of annual spend, you would want to know what it produced. Recurring meetings escape that scrutiny purely because the cost is never totalled.

The cost that salary arithmetic misses

The invoice figure is the floor, not the ceiling. Three additional costs are real and larger than most people assume:

• Fragmentation. A meeting at 2pm does not cost one hour of a working afternoon — it costs the afternoon. Deep work requires uninterrupted blocks, and research on attention residue finds that switching tasks leaves part of your focus on the previous one for a considerable period. Two well-spaced meetings can eliminate a day of productive output.
• Preparation and follow-up. If four of eight attendees spend 20 minutes preparing and someone spends 30 minutes writing notes, that is another 110 minutes of loaded cost the calculator never sees.
• Opportunity cost. The relevant comparison is not zero. It is what those eight people would otherwise have produced, which for a senior group is usually worth considerably more than their hourly rate.

Honest limits

This is an estimate with soft inputs. You often do not know colleagues salaries, so averages are guesses; using role midpoints from a public salary survey is more defensible than inventing figures. The loading factor varies hugely by country — employer contributions in parts of Europe are far above US levels — and by whether you count office space.

More importantly, cost is not the same as waste. A one-hour meeting that prevents a month of misdirected engineering work is extraordinary value at 375. The number is a prompt to ask whether the output justifies the spend, not evidence that it does not. Used as a blunt weapon against all meetings, it produces organisations that cannot make decisions — which is more expensive than any calendar.

Questions people actually ask

What is the single most effective change?

Cutting the invite list. Cost scales linearly with attendees, so halving the room halves the cost immediately, whereas shortening a meeting often just compresses the same discussion. Make optional attendance genuinely optional and share the notes.

Should I use 2,080 or something lower?

2,080 is gross hours. If you want cost per productive hour, subtract leave and public holidays — around 1,880 in many countries — which raises the hourly figure by about 10% and is arguably the more honest number.

Does this work for client-facing time?

Use the billable rate instead of the loaded salary cost. For a consultant billing 150 an hour, a five-person internal meeting has a direct revenue cost, not just a payroll one.

Are the salaries I enter stored?

No. Every figure stays in your browser and nothing is transmitted or saved.