Useless Meeting Cost Calculator

This meeting could have been an email. Calculate exactly how much money is being burned right now.

Meeting Setup

Default assumes $85k/year. Adjust based on seniority.

Burn Rate: $0.00 / sec

Total Cost So Far

$0.00
00:00:00

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The Hidden Cost of "Quick Syncs"

We've all sat in a room (or on a Zoom call) with 10 highly paid professionals while two people debate a minor UI detail for 45 minutes. It feels like a waste of time, but it's worseβ€”it's a massive waste of capital.

Most companies track SaaS subscriptions down to the dollar, but ignore the $1,500 they just burned on a Monday morning status update that could have easily been an email or a Slack thread.

How the Math Works

We take the average annual salary you enter and divide it by 2,080 (the standard number of working hours in a year). We then divide that by 3,600 to get the per-second cost of one employee. Multiply that by the number of attendees, and you get the brutal reality of your run rate.

The Context Switching Penalty

The calculator only measures the raw salary burn. The true cost is much higher. A 30-minute meeting placed right in the middle of the afternoon interrupts "deep work." It often takes developers or designers 20-30 minutes just to get back into their state of flow after hanging up.

Frequently Asked Questions

The formula is straightforward: (Average Annual Salary / 2080 working hours per year) = Hourly Rate. Hourly Rate / 3600 = Per-Second Rate. We then multiply that Per-Second Rate by the number of attendees and update the counter every single second the clock runs.
Visibility drives behavior. When managers and leadership teams see a physical dollar amount ticking up on a screen, they become hyper-aware of tangents, late starts, and unnecessary attendees. It's the most effective way to organically shorten meeting times and improve corporate productivity.
It depends heavily on your industry and the room's composition. For general corporate meetings, $70,000 to $85,000 is a safe average in the US. However, if you are calculating the cost of a tech or software engineering meeting, $120,000 to $150,000 is often far more accurate.
By default, no. This calculates raw salary. To find the "fully burdened" cost of an employee (which includes health insurance, 401k matching, software licenses, and office space), you should multiply their base salary by 1.25 to 1.4. So an employee making $100k actually costs the company ~$130k. You can enter the burdened salary for a scarier (and more accurate) number.
Start by requiring an explicit agenda for every meeting; no agenda means no meeting. Decline invites if your input isn't strictly necessary (read the summary later). Embrace asynchronous communication like Loom videos or detailed Slack updates instead of gathering 8 people just to relay information.
Yes. The Useless Meeting Cost Calculator is 100% free to use, and there are no usage limits. You can run it in the background of your browser all day for every single meeting you attend.
Absolutely not. All the math in this calculator happens strictly on the \"client-side\" using JavaScript directly in your web browser. No financial data, salary inputs, or time logs are sent to our servers or saved anywhere. It is completely private.

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