How much do recurring meetings cost my team?

How do I work out what a recurring meeting costs?

Multiply four numbers: attendees × hours × loaded hourly cost × times per year. That gives you the direct cost, the hours spent in the room.

Each part is simple:

• Attendees: everyone invited who actually turns up, including you.
• Hours: the scheduled length. A 30-minute meeting is 0.5.
• Loaded hourly cost: what an hour of a person costs the organisation, not just their pay. Take salary plus on-costs (employer taxes, pension, benefits), then divide by the hours they work in a year.
• Times per year: a weekly meeting runs about 46 times once you take out holidays.

You don’t need exact salaries. A team average is fine, and it keeps the exercise private. The point is the order of magnitude, not the decimal places.

What does that look like for a real team?

Here is a worked example. It is an illustration with round numbers, not a real company, and the currency is left as plain “units” so you can swap in your own.

Say your team has 8 people, including you. Each person costs the organisation about 90,000 units a year, all in. Each works about 1,800 hours a year. So the loaded hourly cost is 90,000 ÷ 1,800 = 50 units an hour.

Now take one recurring meeting: a weekly 60-minute status update with all 8 people.

• Per meeting: 8 attendees × 1 hour × 50 units = 400 units
• Per year: 400 units × 46 weeks = 18,400 units
• Time: 8 people × 1 hour × 46 weeks = 368 hours a year

That is one meeting. Most teams have 3 or 4 like it. If all four are this size, you are spending roughly 73,600 units and 1,472 hours a year, about four-fifths of one full-time person’s year (90,000 units, 1,800 hours), on the calendar alone.

What costs don’t show up in the formula?

The formula counts the hour in the room. It misses three things that often matter as much.

Preparation. Someone builds the slides, updates the tracker or chases the numbers. In our example, say 2 people spend 30 minutes each getting ready. That is 1 hour × 50 units = 50 units a week, or 2,300 units a year.

Context switching. People rarely go from deep work straight into a meeting and back again. They wind down before and take time to restart after. Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index found that people using Microsoft 365 are interrupted every 2 minutes by a meeting, email, or notification during core hours. Every meeting adds to that churn.

Fragmented focus time. A meeting at 10:30 and another at 14:00 can wreck a whole day. The same Microsoft research found that half of all meetings fall between 9 and 11 in the morning and 1 and 3 in the afternoon, right in the middle of the working morning and afternoon. The cost isn’t the 2 hours of meetings. It’s the 4-hour block that never happened.

Back to our example. Say each of the 8 people loses just 15 minutes of useful focus around the meeting. That is our assumption, not a research figure, so use your own. 8 × 0.25 hours × 50 units = 100 units a week, or 4,600 units a year.

Add it up:

• Direct cost: 18,400 units
• Preparation: 2,300 units
• Lost focus: 4,600 units
• Total: 25,300 units a year for one weekly status meeting

That’s about 38% more than the formula alone suggested. We call this the meeting tax: the share of your team’s week that goes before any real work starts.

Is this just a new-manager problem?

No, it tends to grow as you get more senior. Harvard Business Review reported that executives spend nearly 23 hours a week in meetings, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s.

The scale is huge. Steven Rogelberg’s book The Surprising Science of Meetings (Oxford University Press) cites an estimate of 55 million meetings a day in the United States. The book draws on surveys of more than 5,000 employees.

There is also a blind spot. Rogelberg has written in HBR that leaders consistently rate their own meetings much more positively than attendees do. So the meeting you think is fine may be the one your team dreads. That gap is worth checking before you defend any slot on the calendar.

A quick self-check:

How do I audit my recurring meetings in an afternoon?

Block 3 hours, open your calendar and sort every recurring meeting into one of three piles: keep, shrink or kill.

Step 1: List them (30 minutes). Write down every recurring meeting you run or attend. For each one, note the attendees, length and frequency. Run the formula. Put the yearly cost next to each name.

Step 2: Ask 3 questions of each (60 minutes).

• What decision or outcome does this meeting produce that wouldn’t happen otherwise?
• Who here needs to speak, and who only needs to know what was said?
• If we stopped it for a month, what would break?

Step 3: Sort them (30 minutes).

• Keep if it produces decisions, builds trust or solves problems that need live debate. Your one-on-ones usually live here.
• Shrink if it has value but is too long, too frequent or too crowded. Cut 60 minutes to 30, weekly to fortnightly, 8 people to the 3 who decide.
• Kill if it mainly passes on information. Status updates are the usual suspects.

Step 4: Ask the room (60 minutes, spread over the week). Given the blind spot above, don’t sort alone. Send a short note: “I’m reviewing our recurring meetings. For each one, tell me: keep, shrink or kill, and why. One line is plenty.” You will learn more from the answers than from your own list.

If cancelling feels risky, borrow a trick from a bigger experiment. In early 2023, Shopify used a bot to purge all recurring meetings with three or more people from calendars. Its COO, Kaz Nejatian, said in an interview reported by NPR that the company deleted 322,000 hours of meetings. You don’t need a bot. You can pause your own meetings for 4 weeks and bring back only the ones people miss.

What should I replace killed meetings with?

Replace each one with the cheapest thing that does its real job. Most status meetings exist to share information, and writing does that faster.

Try these on Monday:

• Written updates instead of status meetings. Each person posts 3 lines by Monday noon: what they did, what’s next, where they’re stuck. Read them in 5 minutes instead of sitting through 60.
• A decisions log. One shared page listing what was decided, by whom and when. It removes the need for “alignment” meetings that re-explain old calls.
• Office hours instead of ad hoc syncs. Hold 2 open 30-minute slots a week. People bring questions there, rather than booking you one by one.
• Shorter defaults. Set new meetings to 25 or 50 minutes. People get a gap to reset before the next one.
• Protected focus blocks. Agree a team-wide morning with no meetings. Defend it the way you’d defend a deadline.

For the meetings you keep, end each with one minute on next steps. If people leave unsure what you expect of them, the meeting isn’t finished. That habit alone makes your remaining meetings worth the money.

How do I keep the calendar from filling up again?

Make the review a habit, not a one-off. Recurring meetings creep back, so put a 1-hour audit in your calendar every quarter and rerun the formula.

Three small rules help:

• Every new recurring meeting gets an end date. If it is still needed, someone renews it.
• Every invite states the decision or outcome it is for. No outcome, no meeting.
• Anyone can skip a meeting if they read the notes afterwards, and you say so out loud.

If you want to see where your own habits sit, the free 42 Test asks how you protect your team’s time alongside 41 other everyday behaviours. And the free Meeting Tax calculator does the arithmetic above for your whole calendar, in your own currency. For more on the early years of running a team, see new managers, or why it pays to hold back the answer in the room.