How much does a one hour meeting cost?

For eight people on an average salary of $95,000 with 15 per cent on-costs, a one hour meeting costs about $420. The driver is attendee hours: cost rises in a straight line with both the number of people and the length of the meeting.

What are on-costs and why include them?

On-costs are what an employer pays beyond the salary itself: employer KiwiSaver contributions, ACC levies, and paid leave and public holidays, which are hours paid but not worked. Ignoring them understates the real cost of an hour by at least 15 per cent.

How many working hours are in a year?

The standard convention is 2,080 hours, being 40 hours a week across 52 weeks. Some organisations subtract annual leave and public holidays and use around 1,840 productive hours instead, which produces a higher hourly cost.

Is a meeting cost calculator a fair measure?

It measures the input, not the output. A meeting that costs $420 and prevents a $40,000 mistake is cheap. The figure is useful for spotting recurring meetings that nobody would authorise if the annual cost appeared on a budget line.

Meeting Cost Calculator NZ

A recurring meeting is a standing purchase order that nobody signs off. Eight people in a room for an hour is eight hours of paid time, and if it happens every week it becomes one of the larger line items in a team's budget without ever appearing in one. This calculator puts a number on it. Enter how many people attend, their average annual salary, how long the meeting runs and how often it repeats, and it returns the cost of running it once, the cost per week and the cost across a full year. There is also a field for on-costs, because an employee costs more than their salary: KiwiSaver contributions, ACC levies, leave loading and the overheads that sit behind every seat. The default of 15 per cent is a conservative starting point, and you can raise it if your own loaded rate is higher. The point of the number is not to abolish meetings. It is to make the trade visible, so a weekly hour that produces nothing is recognised as the expense it already was.

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People attending

Average annual salary

Meeting length

min

Times it runs per week

On-costs above salary

$420

cost of running this meeting once

Cost per person per hour$52.52

Total attendee hours8 h

Cost per week$420

Cost per year$21,850

Uses 2,080 paid hours a year, which is 40 hours a week across 52 weeks. If your people work different hours, or the room is a mix of salaries, the average is still the right input; just use a weighted one.

How it works

The hourly cost of a person is their annual salary plus on-costs, divided by the hours they are paid for in a year. This calculator uses 2,080 hours, which is 40 hours a week for 52 weeks, the standard convention for a full-time role.

On-costs are everything the employer pays on top of the salary itself. In New Zealand that is the employer KiwiSaver contribution, the ACC work levy, and the cost of paid leave, public holidays and sick leave, since those are hours paid but not worked. Fifteen per cent is a conservative floor. Once you include recruitment, equipment, software licences and floor space, many organisations use a loaded rate of 30 per cent or more.

From there the arithmetic is direct. Multiply the hourly cost by the number of people and by the length of the meeting in hours to get the cost of one sitting. Multiply by how often it runs each week, and by 52, to get the annual figure.

What the number leaves out is the cost of interruption. An hour blocked in the middle of a morning does not remove one hour of focused work; it usually removes rather more, because the time either side is too fragmented to use well.

Worked example

Eight people on an average salary of $95,000, meeting for 60 minutes once a week, with on-costs at 15 per cent.

The loaded salary is $95,000 multiplied by 1.15, which is $109,250. Divided by 2,080 hours, each person costs $52.52 an hour. Eight people for one hour is 8 attendee hours, so a single sitting costs $420.

Run weekly for a year, that meeting costs $21,850. It is roughly a quarter of another salary, spent on one hour a week.

Two changes worth testing against your own numbers: cutting the meeting to 30 minutes halves it to $10,925 a year, and dropping two people who do not need to be there saves $5,463 a year on its own.

Related calculators

True Cost of an Employee Calculator: the full loaded cost of a hire, not just the salary.
Payroll Cost Calculator: Employer KiwiSaver, ACC and total payroll cost.
Annual Salary per Hour Calculator: convert an annual salary to an hourly figure.
Timesheet Calculator: add up hours worked across a week.

Data sources: Hourly cost uses 2,080 paid hours a year (40 hours a week for 52 weeks). On-costs are set by you; the 15 per cent default reflects employer KiwiSaver and ACC plus paid leave.