How Much Do Meetings Cost Per Employee Per Year? The Honest Number

Q: How much do meetings cost per employee per year?

Research estimates range widely. Flowtrace's 2025 State of Meetings Report puts meeting time at $29,000 per employee per year, while research by Otter.ai and Dr. Steven Rogelberg found companies pay about $80,000 per professional employee annually to attend meetings. The answer depends on salary and meeting load.

Nobody asks how much meetings cost per employee per year until they are about to defend a hiring request or cut a budget, and then they need the number in a hurry. So here it is: depending on salary and meeting load, the honest answer runs from roughly $25,000 to $80,000 per employee per year. That range is wide because the inputs are wide. Let me show you how the number is built, what the published research found, and what it looks like at three salary levels.

How much do meetings cost per employee per year: the research

A few studies have priced this directly, and they are worth knowing because they disagree in an interesting way:

Flowtrace State of Meetings Report 2025: meeting time costs organizations $29,000 per employee every year, with employees logging 392 hours in meetings annually, the equivalent of nearly ten full workweeks.
Otter.ai / Dr. Steven Rogelberg (UNC Charlotte): companies pay an average of $80,000 per professional employee per year to attend meetings, of which $25,000 (31%) goes to meetings the attendees themselves classify as unnecessary.
Fellow State of Meetings Report: the average employee spends 11.3 hours per week in meetings, about 28% of the standard workweek.

The $29,000 and $80,000 figures are not contradictory. Flowtrace prices raw meeting hours at blended rates; the Rogelberg number prices professional employees at their higher loaded rates. Both are measuring something real, which is why I am going to show you the formula so you can price your own team instead of borrowing someone else's average.

The formula and three salary bands

The formula is simple: hourly rate x loaded multiplier x meeting hours per week x 50 weeks. Hourly rate is salary divided by 2,080. The loaded multiplier covers benefits, payroll taxes, and overhead; 1.3 is the standard conservative choice. For meeting hours I will use 11.3 per week, the Fellow number.

Salary	Loaded hourly	Meetings per year
$75,000	$46.88	$26,486
$100,000	$62.50	$35,312
$150,000	$93.75	$52,969

Check the arithmetic for the $100,000 row: $100,000 / 2,080 = $48.08 an hour, times 1.3 = $62.50 loaded. Times 11.3 hours a week = $706.25 a week. Times 50 weeks = $35,312. That sits between Flowtrace's $29,000 and the Rogelberg $80,000, which makes sense: it is one typical knowledge worker, not a blend of juniors and executives.

Why the real number is higher than the formula says

Three things the formula leaves out, all of which push the true number up:

Managers meet more and cost more. The Otter.ai research measured 22.2 meeting hours a week for managers of 4+ direct reports, with an estimated $124,600 a year of meeting investment at their higher rates. A manager's meeting footprint can be three or four times an individual contributor's.
The unnecessary third. Per the Rogelberg research, about 31% of meeting attendance is judged unnecessary by the attendees. For the $100,000 employee above, that is roughly $11,000 a year of pure waste, money spent on meetings nobody in the room thought they needed.
The refocus tax. UC Irvine research measured about 23 minutes to fully refocus after an interruption, and meetings are scheduled interruptions. A 30-minute meeting's real footprint per person is closer to 50 minutes of lost productive time. I do not bake this into the table because it varies, but treat the table as a floor.

What to do with the number

The point of pricing meetings per employee is not to ban meetings. It is to make the budget visible so the tradeoffs are explicit. Multiply your per-employee number by headcount and you get the line item your company is already spending with zero oversight: a 200-person company at the $35,000 mark is spending $7 million a year on meetings. Cut the unnecessary third and you have recovered more than $2 million without changing a single decision anyone needs to make.

The move I recommend is the calendar audit: once a quarter, pull the recurring meetings, multiply hours by attendees by loaded rates, and ask whether each one still earns its slot. You can price any single meeting with the per-minute formula, estimate what your weekly status meeting costs per year, or add up the cost of unproductive meetings across your team. The calculator below does the arithmetic for you.

Price your own team's meeting load, then watch the number tick in real time.

Open the Meeting Cost Calculator

Frequently asked questions

How much do meetings cost per employee per year?

Research estimates range widely. Flowtrace's 2025 report puts meeting time at $29,000 per employee per year, while research by Otter.ai and Dr. Steven Rogelberg found about $80,000 per professional employee annually. The answer depends on salary and meeting load.

How do you calculate meeting cost per employee?

Take the employee's hourly rate (annual salary divided by 2,080), multiply by a 1.25 to 1.4 loaded multiplier for benefits and overhead, then multiply by the hours they spend in meetings per week and 50 weeks.

How many hours per week does the average employee spend in meetings?

The Fellow State of Meetings Report found 11.3 hours per week, about 28% of the workweek. Flowtrace's 2025 report found 392 hours per year, roughly ten full workweeks.

How much of meeting cost is wasted?

Otter.ai and Dr. Rogelberg's research found that $25,000 of the $80,000 spent per professional employee each year, about 31%, goes to meetings attendees themselves deem unnecessary.

Do managers cost more in meetings than individual contributors?

Yes, substantially. Managers spend far more hours in meetings and their hourly rate is higher, so the annual cost per manager runs several multiples of an individual contributor's.

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