Meeting Cost Calculator
- No invented stats
- Written for UK readers
- Published 20 October 2026
Nobody books a meeting thinking about the invoice, because there isn't one — the cost is already buried in the payroll. This calculator turns attendees, salary and length into a pound figure for the time in the room, and shows what a weekly recurring meeting costs over a year. The assumptions about working days and hours are yours to change. It runs entirely in your browser, so nothing you enter is sent anywhere.
How this works
Salaries are annual, meetings are measured in minutes, so the first job is an hourly rate. Multiply working days a year by working hours a day to get paid hours a year, then divide the salary by that:
hourly cost = annual salary ÷ (working days × hours a day)
The defaults are 220 working days and a 7.5-hour day, which is 1,650 hours a year. That is 260 weekdays less around 28 days of holiday and bank holidays, with a bit taken off for sickness. Your own figures will differ — change them in the form and everything recalculates.
From there: hourly cost × attendees × meeting length in hours = the cost of the meeting. The optional on-costs percentage uplifts the salary to something closer to what the employer actually pays, since employer National Insurance, pension contributions and the rest sit on top of the headline figure. Leave it blank to work in plain salary.
The weekly field is the one that tends to change behaviour, because a modest-looking meeting turns into a real annual number when you multiply it by the number of weeks it actually runs.
A worked example
A weekly sales meeting: six people, average salary £45,000, one hour, on the default assumptions and with on-costs left blank.
- Paid hours a year: 220 × 7.5 = 1,650
- Hourly cost: £45,000 ÷ 1,650 = £27.27
- The meeting: £27.27 × 6 people × 1 hour = £163.64
- Run 46 weeks a year: £163.64 × 46 = £7,527.27
Add 15% on-costs and the salary becomes £51,750, the hourly cost becomes £31.36, and the same meeting costs £188.18 — roughly £8,656 a year.
The useful version of this is not the total, it is the comparison. Trimming that meeting from 60 minutes to 40 saves £2,509 a year. Dropping two people who do not need to be there saves £2,509 a year as well. Neither requires anyone to work harder, and both are decisions somebody can make this week.
What this doesn't account for
- The value of the meeting. This is a cost, not a verdict. A £164 meeting that stops a £20,000 deal going wrong is cheap.
- The real cost of a salesperson's hour, which is usually higher than their salary rate, because the hour could have been spent selling. If you want that view, work from revenue per selling hour instead.
- Preparation and recovery. Pre-reading, writing up notes and the interruption cost of context switching are not in the figure, and they can easily exceed the meeting itself.
- Everything beyond salary. Beyond the on-costs box, there is no allowance for overheads, tools, travel or room hire.
- Different salaries in the room. One average covers everyone, so a meeting with the leadership team will be understated.
Before cutting anything, make sure the meeting is worth having: how to run a weekly sales meeting people don't hate and how to run a sales pipeline review meeting both cover what to keep and what to bin. The same arithmetic applies to your customers' time, which is the real argument in your demo is too long.
Spotted a mistake or a number we can't back up? Tell us and we'll fix it.