Meeting Cost Calculator
Watch your meeting cost tick up in real time. Enter attendees and average hourly rate, then hit Start.
Total Meeting Cost
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Meeting Settings
Cost Projections
15 Minutes
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30 Minutes
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1 Hour
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Why Track Meeting Costs?
Meetings are often the largest invisible cost in a software company. A 1-hour meeting with 10 engineers at $100/hr costs $1,000 — before you factor in context-switching. Making that cost visible in real time encourages teams to keep meetings shorter, more focused, and outcome-driven. Research by Harvard Business Review found that organizations waste up to $37 billion a year in unnecessary meetings. Seeing the dollar figure tick up is one of the simplest nudges toward better meeting hygiene.
How is the meeting cost calculated?
The formula is straightforward: (attendees × hourly rate ÷ 3600) × elapsed seconds. This gives you the combined per-second salary cost across all participants. The calculator updates once per second entirely in the browser — no data is ever sent to a server.
What hourly rate should I use?
Use the fully-loaded cost of an employee, not just their base salary. A common rule of thumb is to multiply annual salary by 1.3–1.5 to account for benefits, employer taxes, and overhead, then divide by 2,080 (working hours per year). For a $120k/yr engineer that's roughly $75–$87/hr. If your meeting has mixed seniority, use the average across attendees.
How can planning poker reduce unnecessary meetings?
Poor estimation is the root cause of many unnecessary meetings — refinement sessions drag on because the team doesn't agree on scope, sprints overflow and trigger post-mortems, and stakeholders schedule check-ins to manage uncertainty. Async planning poker keeps estimation fast and structured: everyone votes simultaneously to eliminate anchoring bias, outliers spark brief focused discussion, and the whole process typically wraps in 15–20 minutes instead of an hour.
Fewer Meetings Starts with Better Estimates
Accurate estimates mean fewer surprise status meetings, fewer scope-creep conversations, and fewer post-sprint retrospectives about what went wrong. Try planning poker — it's free, async-friendly, and takes less time than the meeting it replaces.