A team I know timed their standups with a stopwatch for one week. The calendar said 15 minutes. The average was 23. Nobody was doing anything wrong; standups just expand to fill the available awkwardness. If you are asking how much a daily standup meeting costs per year, start with that gap, because everything below assumes the number on the invite, and almost nobody pays the number on the invite.
How much does a daily standup meeting cost per year: the table
All rows use 250 working days a year and a fully-loaded hourly cost, meaning salary plus benefits and overhead. The formula is people x hours x hourly cost x 250.
| Team and format | Per day | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| 5 people, 15 min, $60/hr | $75 | $18,750 |
| 8 people, 15 min, $75/hr | $150 | $37,500 |
| 6 people, 20 min, $120/hr | $240 | $60,000 |
| 12 people, 15 min, $85/hr | $255 | $63,750 |
The middle row is the one that stings. Six senior engineers, a standup that runs a realistic 20 minutes, and you are at $60,000 a year, roughly a junior hire. Surveys of standup data across 50 companies found an average annual cost around $47,000, with the largest at $156,000 for a 15-person senior team. The smallest team in the data still paid $18,000 a year. There is no team size at which a daily standup is cheap.
What the table leaves out: the overrun and the interruption tax
Two multipliers sit on top of every row above. The first is overrun. About 37% of standups run 20 to 25 minutes, and 19% run 30 or more. A 15-minute standup that actually runs 25 minutes costs 67% more than the table says. If your standup has a regular cast of "quick questions," time it for a week before you trust the invite number.
The second is the interruption tax, and this one is worse. A morning standup splits the day's deep work in two. Engineers stop 5 to 10 minutes early to wind down, then need 10 to 15 minutes after to reload their working state. Add 20 minutes of fragmented attention per person per day and a "15-minute" standup costs closer to 35 minutes of productive capacity per person. On the 8-person team above, that pushes the real annual cost from $37,500 toward $87,500. Nobody puts that in the budget spreadsheet, and the meeting keeps its slot anyway.
The three standup formats, ranked by cost
Not all standups are the same meeting. From cheapest to most expensive:
Async written. Everyone posts yesterday, today, and blockers in a channel by a set time. Cost: near zero, plus a few minutes of writing per person. The written record beats the spoken version for everything except live blocker-solving. This is the right default for mature teams doing steady work.
Twice weekly. Monday and Thursday, 15 minutes, same three questions. You keep the human contact and the blocker resolution, and you cut the annual cost by 60% in one move. The teams that switch usually report the same alignment, which tells you something about what the other three days were buying.
Strict 15-minute timebox. Same daily cadence, but someone runs it with a timer and blockers go to a parking lot after the call. This only works if the facilitator actually enforces it, which is why most teams fail at it within a month.
When the standup earns its money
I am not anti-standup. A young team, a new project, a period of high uncertainty: the daily sync earns its $40,000 because blockers die in hours instead of days. What I object to is the standup that outlives its purpose. The team ships the project, settles into steady-state work, and the standup keeps charging full price for a service nobody needs anymore.
The question worth asking is not whether standups work. It is whether yours works, this quarter, for this team. Put the annual number in the calendar description and revisit it the way finance revisits any $40,000 line item. One open question I do not have clean data on: whether async standups resolve blockers as fast as live ones. The teams that switched say yes, but I have never seen a study measure it, so treat that as the best available anecdote.
Price your own daily standup, then watch the number tick in real time.
Open the Meeting Cost CalculatorFrequently asked questions
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Related reading: How to Calculate the Cost of a Meeting Per Minute · How to Calculate the Cost of Unproductive Meetings for Your Team · What Your Weekly Status Meeting Really Costs Per Year
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