What does this meeting actually cost?
Salary time is the one part of a meeting's cost you can put a number on. Enter who is in the room and for how long, and find out what the recurring ones add up to over a year.
Salary time is the floor, not the total. The bigger cost of a meeting is usually the shape it leaves in the day around it: two hours between two meetings is not the same as two uninterrupted hours. No calculator can price that, so treat this figure as the part you can defend in a budget conversation, not the real cost.
Questions people actually ask
How do you calculate the cost of a meeting?
Divide each attendee's annual salary by 2,080 to get an hourly rate, multiply by the meeting length in hours, and sum across attendees. Then apply an overhead multiplier of roughly 1.25 to 1.4 for benefits, payroll taxes, equipment and facilities, since salary alone understates what an employee hour costs.
Why 2,080 hours?
It is 40 hours multiplied by 52 weeks, the standard full-time US payroll figure. It does not subtract holidays or paid leave. If you did subtract them, the effective figure lands nearer 1,880 hours, which would make every meeting look about 10 percent more expensive.
Does meeting cost include more than salary?
Salary is the calculable part. The larger cost is context switching, and research on knowledge work consistently finds that fragmenting a day reduces the value of the gaps between meetings. Treat any figure here as a floor.