How to calculate the cost of a meeting

To calculate the cost of a meeting, add up the hourly rate of everyone in the room and multiply by the length of the meeting in hours. The formula is: meeting cost = (sum of attendee hourly rates) × (duration in minutes ÷ 60). That single line is all you need, but the useful detail is in how you work out each rate and whether you count salary alone or the true cost to the organisation.

The simple meeting cost formula

At its core the calculation is straightforward. For each person in the meeting, take their hourly rate. Add those rates together to get the cost of the room per hour. Then scale that by how long the meeting actually runs.

Written out per attendee, it looks like this:

• Cost per attendee = hourly rate × (duration in minutes ÷ 60)
• Total meeting cost = the sum of every attendee's cost

A 60-minute meeting simply costs one hour of everyone's time. A 30-minute meeting costs half of that. The only slightly fiddly part is converting an annual salary into an hourly figure, which is worth doing once and reusing.

How to turn a salary into an hourly rate

Most people are paid an annual salary rather than an hourly wage, so you need a sensible divisor. A UK employee working full time clocks up roughly 1,750 productive hours a year once you account for holiday and bank holidays (about 52 weeks at 37.5 hours, minus around 28 days of annual leave and 8 bank holidays). A clean rule of thumb is therefore:

Hourly rate ≈ annual salary ÷ 1,750

Here are a few illustrative, hypothetical salaries converted this way:

Annual salary	Approximate hourly rate
£35,000	£20.00
£55,000	£31.43
£70,000	£40.00
£120,000	£68.57

You do not need to be precise to the penny. The goal is a defensible estimate, not payroll-grade accuracy, and dividing by 1,750 gets you close enough for any planning decision.

Why the fully-loaded cost is higher than salary

Salary is only part of what an employee actually costs. The organisation also pays employer National Insurance contributions, pension contributions, equipment, software licences, and a share of office and overhead costs. None of that appears on the payslip, but all of it is real money spent to keep that person working.

To reflect this, many people apply a fully-loaded multiplier of roughly 1.25× to 1.4× base salary. So a £55,000 salary might represent something closer to £69,000–£77,000 in true cost. Whether you apply this multiplier is a judgement call: use base salary for a conservative figure, or the loaded cost when you want to reflect what the business genuinely spends. The important thing is to be consistent, so that comparisons between meetings mean something.

A full worked example

Imagine a 45-minute project review with five people: a director, a project manager, two engineers, and a designer. Using the hypothetical salaries above and dividing each by 1,750:

Role	Salary	Hourly rate
Director	£120,000	£68.57
Project manager	£70,000	£40.00
Engineer × 2	£65,000 each	£37.14 each
Designer	£55,000	£31.43

Step 1 — add the hourly rates. £68.57 + £40.00 + £37.14 + £37.14 + £31.43 = £214.29 per hour for the whole room.

Step 2 — scale by duration. The meeting runs 45 minutes, which is 45 ÷ 60 = 0.75 of an hour. So £214.29 × 0.75 = £160.71.

Step 3 — decide on the loaded cost. Applying a 1.3× fully-loaded multiplier gives £160.71 × 1.3 = £208.93.

So this recurring 45-minute review costs roughly £161 on salary alone, or about £209 fully loaded. Neither number is enormous on its own, which is exactly why meetings are easy to schedule without thinking. The picture changes once you notice it repeats.

Common mistakes when calculating meeting cost

A few things quietly push the real figure higher than a quick estimate suggests:

• Forgetting preparation and follow-up. A one-hour meeting that needs 15 minutes of prep from each person, plus notes afterwards, costs considerably more than the hour on the calendar. The scheduled time is a floor, not a ceiling.
• Over-inviting. Every additional attendee adds their full hourly rate for the entire duration. Three optional observers can easily double the cost of a small working session while contributing little to the decision.
• Ignoring how recurring meetings compound. The example above looks modest at £161. Held weekly across a working year (around 46 weeks after holidays), it becomes roughly £7,400 of salaried time, or nearer £9,600 fully loaded. Recurring meetings deserve the most scrutiny precisely because their cost accumulates invisibly.
• Mixing your basis. Comparing one meeting on base salary against another on loaded cost produces misleading conclusions. Pick one approach and apply it everywhere.

From formula to habit

The point of costing a meeting is not to discourage meetings, but to spend attention deliberately. Once you can see a figure, questions like "does everyone need to be here?" and "could this be 30 minutes instead of 60?" answer themselves. If you would rather skip the arithmetic, you can drop in salaries or rates and get a live total from the meeting cost calculator. And when the numbers surprise you, our guide on how to reduce meeting costs covers practical ways to bring them down without cancelling the work that genuinely needs a room.