Meetings are the largest hidden line on most teams' P&L. UK companies hold an estimated 11 million meetings every working day, and Harvard Business Review research suggests roughly 37% of that time is unproductive. This calculator gives you a quick, defensible number to put against the agenda before you decide whether the half-hour standup actually deserves to recur every week.
The hourly cost of one attendee is derived from their annual salary divided by 52 weeks and then by 40 working hours — the standard UK full-time baseline of 2,080 hours per year. That hourly rate is multiplied by the meeting duration (converted from minutes to a fraction of an hour) and by the number of attendees to give the total cost. A second pass multiplies by 52 to project the annual cost if the same meeting recurs every working week. The figure is raw salary only; for a fully-loaded cost including NI, pension and overheads, multiply by roughly 1.25–1.40.
Annual salary is divided by 52 weeks and then by 40 hours to give an effective hourly cost. A £45,000 salary therefore comes out at roughly £21.63 per hour — multiply by attendee count and meeting fraction-of-an-hour to get the total.
That column projects what the same meeting costs if it recurs every working week of the year — total cost × 52. A 60-minute, 10-person standup at £45k average salary clocks up roughly £11,250 a year before anyone has done any actual work.
No — the figure is raw salary only. To get a "fully-loaded" cost, multiply the result by 1.25 to 1.40, which approximates UK employer National Insurance, pension contributions and a share of fixed overheads.
Yes. The arithmetic is currency-agnostic: enter your local annual salary figure and treat the £ symbol as your own currency. The 52-week, 40-hour assumption is a UK norm but matches most full-time salaried roles globally.
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