Meeting Cost Calculator

Why does this even need a calculator?

Meetings are often the most expensive activity a business undertakes – yet the cost is completely invisible. When you book a one-hour meeting with five people who earn an average of £60,000 a year, you’re spending £144 of the business’s money. If two of those people earn significantly more, the true cost could easily be £200–300 or higher.

Research consistently shows that at least half of meeting time is unproductive – people sitting in on calls they could have caught up with in a three-line summary, status updates that could have been a Slack message, and decision meetings that end without a decision. The average UK professional spends 31 hours per month in meetings, which is nearly a full working week every month.

Making meeting cost visible changes behaviour. When teams see that a recurring weekly meeting costs the business £5,000 a year, they start asking whether it’s delivering £5,000 of value. Most aren’t. This calculator exists to help make that case – whether you’re a team lead trying to protect your team’s time, an operations manager looking to cut unnecessary overhead, or an MD who suspects your management meetings could be half as long.

This is a conservative estimate. For a more accurate picture, you also need to factor in employer National Insurance contributions (currently 15% of salary above the secondary threshold) and minimum employer pension contributions (currently 3% under auto-enrolment). Together, these add roughly 18–20% to base salary costs.

We apply a 1.30 multiplier by default (NI + pension), which means the true employer cost of a meeting is typically 30% higher than the salary calculation alone. Adjust the figures above to match your organisation’s actual salary bands for the most accurate result.

Statistics sourced from Microsoft Work Trend Index (2023), Harvard Business Review “Stop the Meeting Madness” (Perlow et al., 2017), and Otter.ai’s State of Meetings Report. Figures are representative averages across industries – actual meeting loads vary by role and sector.