Attendees multiplied by length multiplied by an average hourly rate, with an overhead percentage added on top. The arithmetic is trivial; the useful part is what sits around it. A one-hour meeting with six people at forty an hour is not a forty-unit cost, it is six person-hours, and if it repeats every week it is a standing commitment rather than an event.
Choosing a frequency adds the yearly figure and the number of person-days it consumes, which is usually the number that changes behaviour. A weekly hour with six people is roughly thirty-six person-days a year — most of two months of one person’s working time, spent by a group who each experienced it as an hour.
What the number is and is not
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The overhead multiplier is a convention, not your figure:
salary is only part of what an employee costs — employer contributions, equipment, space and benefits sit on top. Twenty-five to forty percent is a common rough allowance, and your finance team will have the real number.
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Cancelling a meeting does not recover the money:
the time goes somewhere else, and whether that somewhere is more valuable is the actual question. The figure compares options; it is not a saving you can bank.
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The recurring figure is the one worth looking at:
a single meeting rarely looks expensive. The same meeting every week for a year usually does, and halving the attendee list or the length halves it.
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Not every expensive meeting is a bad one:
a decision that needed eight people in a room can be worth far more than it cost. The number is a prompt to ask whether everyone needed to be there, not an argument that the meeting was waste.
The arithmetic is trivial; the reframing is the point
Attendees multiplied by length multiplied by an average hourly rate, with an overhead percentage added on top — that is the entire calculation the [msm_tool slug="meeting-cost-calculator"] performs. What it is actually useful for is the reframing: a one-hour meeting with six people at forty an hour is not a single forty-unit cost, it is six person-hours spent at once, and if it happens every week it stops being an event and becomes a standing commitment.
The overhead multiplier is a convention, not a precise figure
Salary is only part of what an employee actually costs — employer contributions, equipment, office space and benefits all sit on top of it. Twenty-five to forty per cent is a common rough allowance for that gap, useful for an estimate, though a finance team will always have the real number for anything that needs to be precise.
Cancelling a meeting does not recover the money
The time simply moves somewhere else rather than being banked as a saving, and whether that somewhere else is more valuable is the actual question worth asking. The figure this produces is a way of comparing options against each other, not a sum that can be claimed back once a meeting is cancelled.
The recurring figure is the one worth actually looking at
A single meeting rarely looks expensive on its own. The same meeting held every week for a year usually does, and cutting either the attendee list or the length in half cuts the annual figure by the same proportion — which is where a small, easy change compounds into something worth noticing.
Not every expensive meeting was a bad one
A decision that genuinely needed eight people in a room can be worth considerably more than whatever it cost to hold it. The number this produces is a prompt to ask whether everyone in the room needed to be there, not a verdict that the meeting itself was a waste of the time it consumed.