Drop in how many people are invited, roughly what they earn an hour, and how long the meeting runs. You'll see the salary time it burns, right down to the cost of every minute you run over.
Nobody writes a check to hold a meeting, so it feels free. It isn't. Every person in the room is being paid to be there, and that time comes straight out of the work they'd otherwise be doing.
Putting a dollar figure on it changes the conversation. Suddenly "should we invite the whole team?" and "could this be an email?" stop being annoying questions and start looking like real savings.
Two levers move the total the most: headcount and length. Cutting a 60-minute meeting to 30, or dropping it from eight people to four, roughly halves the cost each time.
Try it with a recurring meeting on your calendar. If the weekly figure makes you wince, that's usually a sign the format is worth rethinking, not that the topic doesn't matter.
Take a rough annual salary and divide by about 2,080 working hours. For a fuller picture, bump that up 20 to 30 percent to cover benefits and overhead, since that's closer to what an hour of someone's time actually costs the business.
No, and that's worth remembering. The number here is just the salary time in the room. The real drag of a meeting often comes from the focus people lose before and after it, which this tool can't measure but you shouldn't ignore.
A 15-minute daily standup feels free, but multiply it by five days and a full team and the weekly figure gets your attention. Recurring meetings are where the money quietly adds up, so seeing the weekly cost helps you decide if it earns its place.
Not automatically. Plenty of expensive meetings are worth every dollar. The point is to make the cost visible so you can ask whether that hour with eight people beats the alternative, like a short written update.
You can, though flip your thinking. For billable time you'd usually charge the client rather than count it as an internal cost, so plug in your billing rate instead of salary to see the revenue a meeting represents.