Nobody argues that meetings are expensive. Everybody keeps booking them anyway — because "an hour" sounds cheap, and because the bill never arrives.

It does arrive. It's just spread across six calendars where nobody adds it up.

Contents

The arithmetic nobody does

A one-hour meeting with six people costs six hours. That's the whole trick, and it's why "it's only an hour" is the most expensive sentence in an office.

Put a rate on it. Take a loaded cost of $45 an hour — salary plus payroll taxes, benefits and overhead, which is what an hour of someone's time actually costs an employer, not what lands in their bank account:

People One hour costs
3 $135
6 $270
10 $450

Put your own numbers in if you want the figure for a meeting you actually attend.

If you bill by the hour, the number is harsher still: it isn't a cost, it's revenue that didn't happen. Six billable people at $90 an hour is $540 of invoiceable time that no longer exists.

None of this means the meeting was a waste. It means the meeting had a price, and you should know it before you decide whether it was worth paying.

What the recurring ones cost

One-off meetings aren't the problem. The standing ones are, because they're priced once — when nobody was watching — and then charged every week forever.

That six-person hour, weekly:

  • $270 a week
  • $1,170 a month
  • $14,040 a year

Fourteen thousand dollars is a real budget line. It's a contractor for two months, or a piece of equipment, or a salary top-up. If someone proposed spending $14,000 on a subscription, there'd be a conversation. The weekly status meeting gets renewed in silence.

Try this once: take your three recurring meetings, price them for the year, and write the totals on the same page. The list is usually enough. Nobody needs convincing after seeing it.

A meeting that costs $14,000 a year deserves the same scrutiny as a $14,000 purchase order. It rarely gets it, because nobody signs for it.

The cost that isn't on the invoice

Salary time is the part you can defend in a spreadsheet. It's also the smaller half.

Fragmentation costs more than the meeting. A meeting at 2 p.m. doesn't cost 2 to 3. It costs the afternoon. The thirty minutes before are too short to start anything serious, and the return afterwards isn't instant — deep concentration takes real time to rebuild. One well-placed meeting can neutralise a whole afternoon of deep work while showing up in the calendar as sixty minutes.

Preparation and follow-up are invisible. Someone built the agenda. Three people re-read a document. Two wrote notes afterwards. None of it appears anywhere, and all of it was time.

Waiting has a price. Ten people arriving on time for a meeting that starts five minutes late is fifty minutes, gone, every occurrence.

This is why a meeting priced only at salary time is priced low. The honest figure is meaningfully higher than the table above — you just can't defend the multiplier in a spreadsheet, so most people quietly pretend it's zero.

The meetings worth every dollar

The point of pricing meetings is not to eliminate them. It's to stop spending the expensive ones on cheap problems.

Meetings genuinely earn their cost when:

  • A decision needs disagreement. Real friction, resolved live, beats four days of email that ends in a call anyway.
  • The subject is sensitive. Feedback, conflict, bad news. Writing those down makes them worse.
  • The problem is still fuzzy. When nobody can articulate the question yet, thinking out loud together is faster than anything asynchronous.
  • Something needs to be built together. A plan, an estimate, a first draft.

Meetings are terrible at one thing they're used for constantly: transmitting information that could be read. A status update is a document. Turning it into a meeting means paying six salaries so that one person can be read aloud.

Making the case with numbers

"We have too many meetings" is an opinion, and opinions lose to calendars. A number is different.

The trouble is that most teams have no idea how much time meetings actually take — they have a feeling. So make the feeling measurable:

  1. Create a project called "Internal meetings." One project, nothing more elaborate.
  2. Have everyone log meeting time against it for a month. No judgement, no debate, just recording.
  3. Read the report. Total hours, multiplied by a loaded rate.

A month is enough. The number is usually larger than anyone guessed, and it changes the conversation from "I feel like we meet too much" to "we spent 94 hours in internal meetings last month — which ones do we keep?"

That question has good answers. The first one never does.

If you want to go further, split the project by type — status, decisions, client calls. You'll almost always find that the cheapest category to eliminate is also the biggest.

FAQ

What hourly rate should I use?

Use loaded cost, not salary: gross pay plus payroll taxes, benefits and overhead. A common shortcut is salary × 1.25 to 1.4, or work out the statutory part exactly with the employee cost calculator. If you bill by the hour, use your billing rate instead — for you the meeting isn't a cost, it's revenue foregone.

Should I count the organizer's preparation time?

Yes, if you want an honest figure. Agenda, document, follow-up notes: it's real work that exists only because the meeting exists.

Does a shorter meeting actually cost less?

Yes, and more than proportionally: you cut the salary time and you make it easier to place the meeting at the edge of a day instead of through the middle of one. Cutting a recurring hour to thirty minutes halves a line item that recurs forever.

Isn't this a bit much for a small team?

Small teams feel it more, not less. When five people meet, that's most of the company in one room — nothing else is happening anywhere.

Conclusion

Meetings aren't expensive because they're long. They're expensive because the cost is multiplied by the number of chairs and then divided across enough calendars that nobody sees the total.

Price your three recurring meetings this week. If a number turns out to be uncomfortable, that's the meeting to change first.

The measurement is easier than the argument. Puuunch tracks time by project, so "internal meetings" becomes a line in a report instead of a debate — see how the reports work.