Put the people in the room, the length, and how often it repeats. You get one number for the meeting, one for the year, and a live ticker for the screen.
Enter each person by role. Use an annual salary or an hourly rate, whichever you actually know. Set the count above 1 when several people hold the same role and the same pay.
| Role | Pay basis | Amount | People | Loaded per hour | Cost this meeting |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total in the room | $0 | $0 | |||
Yearly figures use 50 working weeks and 250 working days.
Counting this way means holidays and time off do not inflate the yearly figure. Prep minutes are yours to set. Leave them at zero if you only want the time inside the room.
Set your own prices here. Counts are based on the yearly figure above.
A meeting earns its cost when it does something a document cannot.
This tool is not an argument against meetings. It is an argument against unpriced ones.
And the reverse. If the meeting exists to share status, to read a document out loud, to keep people feeling included, or because it was on the calendar last week, the number above is what that habit costs.
Salary divided by paid hours gives an hourly wage, multiplied by 1.43 for the full employer cost.
Wages are only part of what an employer pays for an employee. The multiplier comes from a public figure: benefits averaged 30.1 percent of total employer compensation costs for private industry workers in March 2026, US Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecec.nr0.htm. If benefits are 30.1 percent of the total, wages are 69.9 percent, and dividing by 0.699 gives 1.43.
Your own load may differ. A contractor paid by the hour usually carries no benefit load at all, so entering an hourly rate still applies 1.43 and will overstate that person. If everyone in the room is a contractor, read the figure as a ceiling and divide it back by 1.43 to see the floor.
Opsbench sells one thing, a full time ecommerce operator working your business hours inside your Shopify, Klaviyo, Slack and ad accounts, at $2,950 a month. If your problem is only meeting hygiene, cancel one recurring meeting and keep your money. If the honest answer is that your meetings are fine and the operations behind them are the problem, that is the conversation to have.
Printed from the free Opsbench meeting cost calculator, opsbench.co/library. Loaded cost uses a 1.43 multiplier. Basis: benefits averaged 30.1 percent of total employer compensation costs for private industry workers in March 2026, US Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecec.nr0.htm