Ballast
Ballast/Time desk/No. 12

Calculate · Time desk · 60 seconds

The Standing Meeting Bill

A recurring meeting is a subscription paid in the most expensive currency a company holds — senior hours. This instrument writes the annual invoice: money, collective hours, and the number of full-time salaries the slot quietly consumes.

Currency-agnostic · symbol only Rules version 1.0 Reviewed July 2026

The manifest — your numbers

people

Everyone whose calendar it blocks, including the ones on mute.

Σ/ h

If unsure: average salary × 1.4 burden ÷ 1,840 hours. Senior rooms run far higher.

min

Daily counts working days: 230 a year. Weekly, 46. The house calendar.

min

Reading the doc, closing the other work, reopening it after. Rarely zero.

Nothing you type leaves this page. The instrument runs entirely in your browser; there is no account and no record.

The reading

Within reason.

$48,300

the annual bill · 7 people, weekly, 60 min + prep

The invoice

One occurrence, all attendees
Occurrences a year
Collective hours a year
Full-time people consumed
The annual bill

Same room, three durations

If it ranAnnual billSaved vs now

What moves this result

What would sink this reading

The rate is usually understated. Loaded cost runs 1.3–1.5× salary before you count the opportunity cost of what senior people would otherwise ship.

Some meetings are cheap at any price — the ones where decisions are actually made. Bill the status readouts; protect the decision rooms.

The unbilled item is fragmentation: a meeting in the middle of a morning can void the whole morning for makers. This instrument prices only part of that.

Questions people bring to this desk

How much does a recurring meeting cost per year?
Attendees × (duration + prep) × loaded hourly rate × occurrences. Seven people, one hour plus fifteen minutes of prep each, weekly at a $120 loaded rate is roughly $48,000 a year — before counting the work displaced around it.
What is a loaded hourly rate?
Salary plus employer burden — taxes, benefits, tools, space — divided by working hours. A workable estimate is annual salary × 1.4 ÷ 1,840 hours. It is what an hour of the person costs the company, not what the person is paid.
When is an expensive meeting worth keeping?
When decisions are made in it. A costly hour that regularly commits the company beats a cheap one that merely reports status. The instrument prices the slot; whether it produces more than it costs is the owner's call — now with a number attached.
Methodology — the formula, printed

Everything below is calculated from your inputs. Nothing is fetched, nothing is looked up.

per_occurrence = attendees × (duration + prep)/60 × loaded_hourly annual_bill = per_occurrence × occurrences occurrences — daily 230 · weekly 46 · biweekly 23 · monthly 12 FTE_consumed = collective_hours / 1,840

The gauge reads the meeting in full-time people: collective annual hours over a 1,840-hour working year (40 × 46). The line sits at one full salary; past it, the slot employs a phantom person. The house calls anything over half a headcount worth a hard look.

Limitations. Loaded hourly cost is an estimate — payroll data beats the 1.4× rule where you have it. Value produced by the meeting is not modelled; that judgment stays with whoever owns the invite.