Remote work · Calculator
Add the attendees, set the meeting length, and see the real loaded cost. We include direct salary cost and a 15% context-switch overhead, applied on each side of the meeting.
Direct cost is the simple part. For each attendee we convert their input to an hourly rate, dividing annual salary by 2,080 working hours, or using the hourly rate you entered, then multiply by the meeting duration. We do not load on benefits, equity, office overhead, or anything else, because reasonable people disagree on how to value those. If you want a fully-loaded number, multiply the total by 1.3 to 1.6.
The context-switch overhead is the more interesting line. Interruption recovery research (Mark, Gudith, Klocke and others) consistently puts the cost of being pulled out of focused work at 10 to 25 minutes per switch. We apply a conservative 15% of the meeting duration on each side per attendee, both the wind-down before and the spool-up after. For a one-hour meeting, that adds 18 minutes of effective cost per person. Real teams often find the number is higher, especially for engineers in flow.
The "what could you have shipped instead" line normalises the dollar total against a typical senior and junior engineer day. Useful for sanity-checking whether a recurring meeting is earning its keep. If a weekly meeting costs three engineer-days a month, is it delivering three engineer-days of value? Often yes, kickoffs, blocker unsticking, customer feedback, and often no.
The calculator starts with a familiar product-team quartet: a senior engineer at $180,000, an engineering manager at $220,000, a product manager at $175,000, and a designer at $150,000. Divided by 2,080 hours, their combined rate is about $349 an hour. A one-hour meeting therefore costs roughly $349 in direct salary, plus about $105 of context-switch overhead (30% of the direct cost, 15% on each side), for a loaded total near $453, or about $7.55 per minute.
Run weekly for a year, that single hour becomes roughly $23,600, which is about 34 senior-engineer days of capacity. That is the framing that changes behaviour: nobody would approve a project that burned a senior engineer for seven working weeks without asking what it delivers, yet recurring meetings routinely reach that scale without anyone doing the arithmetic.
The cost scales linearly with people and minutes, so the levers are blunt but effective. Halving attendance halves the cost: invite the people who will decide or contribute, and publish notes for everyone else. Defaulting to 25 or 45 minutes instead of 30 or 60 trims 15 to 25 percent off every occurrence without changing anything else. Moving a status meeting to a written update removes the whole line item, our async communication guide covers which meetings survive that conversion and which genuinely do not.
For meetings that stay, an agenda circulated in advance converts the first ten minutes of every meeting from context loading into decision making, and a named decision owner prevents the follow-up meeting that doubles the true cost. If your team spans time zones, pair this with the meeting scheduler so the slot you keep at least lands inside everyone's working hours.
2,080 is 40 hours a week times 52 weeks, a common full-time convention in payroll math. Full-time hours vary by country, and nobody works every one of those hours, so it slightly understates the true hourly cost, but it is the convention employers and finance teams recognise, so the calculator uses it for the salary-to-hourly conversion.
Because a meeting interrupts twice. Attendees wind down their focused work before it starts, and they need time to reload context after it ends. Interruption-recovery studies, including the often-cited work of Mark, Gudith, and Klocke, find it takes tens of minutes to get back into deep work after a switch. The calculator applies a conservative 15% of the meeting length on each side, so a one-hour meeting carries 18 minutes of hidden cost per attendee.
No. The direct cost line is salary only, converted to an hourly rate. Fully loaded employment costs, benefits, payroll taxes, equipment, and office space, sit well above salary alone, and reasonable people disagree about how to allocate them. If you want a loaded figure, multiply the calculator's total by 1.3 to 1.6.
No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser. Roles, salaries, and meeting length never leave the page. The share link encodes your setup in the URL itself, so anyone opening the link recreates the same numbers locally without anything being uploaded.
Compare its annual cost against what it would take to replace it. A weekly one-hour meeting with the calculator's default room costs roughly 34 senior-engineer days a year. If a written weekly update, a shared dashboard, or a fortnightly cadence could deliver the same coordination, the meeting is buying very little for a very real price. If it unblocks decisions that would otherwise stall for days, it is probably earning its keep.