How much does a recurring meeting cost per year?

Attendees × (duration plus prep) × loaded hourly rate × occurrences. A weekly 30-minute meeting for six people at a $95 loaded hour bills about $13,000 a year; add 15 minutes of prep and refocus each and it clears $19,000.

What is a loaded cost per employee hour?

Salary times roughly 1.4 — covering benefits, payroll taxes and overhead — divided by about 1,840 working hours a year. A $100,000 salary is about $76 per loaded hour; senior staff run $150–400.

How many meetings equal a full-time employee?

Divide the meeting's collective annual hours by 1,840. A daily 30-minute standup for eight people consumes 920 collective hours — half a full-time person — before prep; past 1.0 FTE the slot employs a phantom worker.

Meeting Cost Calculator — The Annual Bill of a Recurring Meeting

Where the bill comes from

The invoice

The bill at every headcount

The annual invoice as the room grows. Every optional attendee is a line item; the dot is your meeting today. Hover to explore.

Four cheaper versions of the same meeting

Auditing the calendar

How we calculate

What is included

One occurrence costs every attendee’s blocked minutes (plus prep and refocus, when the chip is on) at the loaded rate — salary with benefits, taxes and overhead, roughly salary × 1.4 over 1,840 working hours. The year multiplies by the cadence: daily 230, weekly 46, biweekly 23, monthly 12. The FTE line divides collective hours by one 1,840-hour working year — the number of whole employees the slot consumes.

What is estimated or left out

The value the meeting produces is not modeled — that judgment stays with whoever owns the invite, and some thirty-minute standups genuinely run the company. Payroll data beats the 1.4× loading rule where you have it. And the quiet costs — the deep work that never restarted, the decision delayed a week for the next slot — are real, unpriced here, and usually larger than the invoice.

The formula, in plain words

per occurrence = Σ attendees × (duration + prep)/60 × loaded rate
annual bill    = per occurrence × cadence (230 / 46 / 23 / 12)
FTE consumed   = collective hours ÷ 1,840
one phantom employee = the line at 1.0 FTE

Common questions

How much does a meeting actually cost?: Attendees × time × loaded hourly rate. Six people, thirty minutes, at a $95 loaded hour: $285 per occurrence — $13,110 a year when it’s weekly, before anyone prepares or refocuses. The room rarely knows the figure, which is exactly why writing the invoice changes the invite list.
What is a loaded hourly rate?: Salary plus everything an employer pays to have the person in the chair: benefits, payroll taxes, equipment, office overhead — typically 1.3–1.5× salary. Divided by about 1,840 real working hours a year, a $100k salary loads to roughly $76 an hour. Senior rooms run $150–400 per attendee-hour.
Should we cancel our standing meetings?: Audit, don’t massacre. The test per slot: would the owner rebuy it today at the printed price? Kill the ones that fail, halve the duration or the room of the borderline ones (a 25-minute default is a stealth 17% refund), and keep the ones that pass without guilt — some meetings are the cheapest coordination money buys.

The Standing Meeting Bill