Meeting cost calculator

Each person's hourly cost is their pay per hour. A salary is divided by the paid hours in a year: 2,080 by default, which is 40 hours a week for 52 weeks. Hourly rates are used as they are.

The meeting's cost is everyone's hourly cost added up, times its length in hours. For a regular meeting, the yearly figure is that times the number of meetings: 260 for every weekday, 52 weekly, 26 every two weeks and 12 monthly.

For example, five people on $85,000 a year earn about $40.87 an hour each, so an hour together costs about $204. Held weekly, that's about $10,600 a year and 260 hours of people's time.

Pay alone undercounts what an hour of someone's time costs their employer. In US private industry, wages and salaries are about 70% of compensation costs and benefits the other 30%,^[1] so benefits add roughly 40% on top of pay. Office space, equipment and software add more.

Enter a percentage under Benefits, overhead and hours to include them. Leave it at 0 to count pay only.

The calculator counts the time in the room. It doesn't count:

• Preparation, and reading or writing up notes afterwards.
• Getting back into focused work after the meeting.
• Work that waits while everyone's in the meeting.

So treat the result as the least the meeting costs.

When a team spans time zones, someone often joins early in the morning or late at night. That cost doesn't show up in pay, but it does in tiredness and goodwill. The meeting planner finds times inside everyone's working hours, and scheduling across time zones covers rotating a regular meeting so the same people aren't always the ones staying up.

• Invite fewer people. Share notes with those who only need the outcome.
• Shorten the default. 25 or 50 minutes instead of 30 or 60 leaves time between meetings.
• Meet less often. Moving a weekly meeting to every two weeks halves its yearly cost.
• Write updates instead. Status updates often work as a message, and keep the meeting for decisions.

The calculator runs in your browser. Salaries and results aren't sent to TimeZonar or stored.

• Time zone converter

  Convert any date and time between two places, with the working shown and daylight saving handled.

• Meeting planner

  Find the best meeting time for up to 10 places, scored hour by hour, with daylight saving handled.

• World clock

  The time right now in every UTC offset in use, west to east, with your own cities pinned on top.

• UTC offset calculator

  Find the UTC offset of any place on any date, or every place on an offset, in every notation.

• DST change tracker

  Every clock change worldwide in the next 12 months, your places' next change, and when two places' gap shifts.

1. 1.U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation. Wages being 70% of private-industry compensation costs, and benefits 30% (June 2026).