What does your leadership team's meeting rhythm cost, and is it buying decisions?
Enter the attendees, a salary band, the duration and how often the meeting happens, and you get what one meeting costs per occurrence and per year. Add how many decisions it makes and you get the number most calculators leave out: the cost per decision. If the answer is zero decisions, the page says so, because that is the point.
Switch to leadership team mode and enter your whole recurring rhythm, up to eight meetings. A preset loads a daily stand up, a weekly, a monthly and a quarterly that you edit. You get the annual cost of the rhythm, the hours each person spends in it per week, the cost per decision across the lot, and a Meeting Load score from 0 to 100 against a reference rhythm, with a result page for your band.
Salaries never leave your browser as figures. The loading factor and working hours are shown and you can change them; occurrences per year are shown next to each frequency. No email is needed for any of it, and one meeting takes under two minutes.
Leadership Team Meeting Cost Calculator
What does our leadership team's meeting rhythm cost, and is it buying decisions?
What you get
- Your score out of 100 and its band
- The figures behind it, shown with their assumptions
- The four components and which one is driving the score
- A link to your full result page
Email me this result
Optional. Your score is already on screen. Enter your details and a copy of this result, your score, your level and your four dimension scores, is sent to you.
Done. Your result is on its way.
Related tools
The four results
Every completed run lands on one of these pages, with your own scores drawn from the link the tool gives you. Each one is readable without taking the tool.
- LeanYour team meets less than the reference. Is anything decided?
- WorkingYour rhythm is near the reference. Now ask what each is for.
- HeavyYour team meets well over the reference. Shortening will not fix it.
- Meeting BoundYour team has replaced deciding with meeting.
How this differs
Generic meeting cost calculators already answer the question of what one meeting costs, and this page answers it too. What it adds is a leadership team mode that costs the whole recurring rhythm, a cost per decision figure for each meeting and for the rhythm as a whole, and a Meeting Load score that can be benchmarked once enough teams have used it.
It differs from the live Meeting and Rhythm diagnostic on this site, which scores your rhythm habits from the Rhythm Protocol; this calculator puts a currency figure on the rhythm and a load number on the team, and the Rhythm diagnostic is the linked next step from every result page. The reference rhythm is the Rhythm Protocol cadence: a fifteen minute daily stand up, a ninety minute weekly leadership meeting, a three hour monthly and a full day each quarter.
What happens to your responses
Your score, your result and your dimension scores are shown on screen without an email address. An anonymous copy of the score and the dimension scores, with no name, email or free text, joins the aggregate statistics for this tool, which are published only when a cut has at least 30 completions. Email is optional. Only if you ask for the result by email is it written to your contact record, and only then. The full rules are on the methodology page.
Common questions
How is the cost of a meeting calculated?
Each attendee's loaded hourly cost is their annual salary times a loading factor, divided by working hours per year. The cost per occurrence is attendees times that hourly cost times the duration in hours. Annual cost multiplies by how often the meeting happens: 235 for daily (the same 25 days of leave and holidays the working hours assume), 48 for weekly, 24 for every two weeks, 12 monthly, 4 quarterly. The loading factor and working hours are shown and you can edit them; the occurrences per year are shown next to each frequency.
What is the loading factor and why is it 1.43?
Salary is not the full cost of employing someone. Employer taxes, pensions, insurance and other benefits add to it, and the loading factor is the multiplier that turns salary into total compensation. The default of 1.43 comes from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for June 2026 (published 9 September 2026), where benefits were 30 percent of total compensation for private industry workers, so total cost is salary divided by 0.70. A Nordic employer with high payroll taxes will often sit higher, and a lean US firm lower. If you know your own figure, change it; the result updates at once.
What is cost per decision?
Annual cost divided by the number of decisions the meeting makes in a year. You enter decisions per meeting, and the calculator does the rest. It is optional, but it is the number that tells you whether the meeting is buying anything. If you enter zero, the page says the cost per decision is undefined, which is the point of asking.
What is the Meeting Load score?
In leadership team mode, the calculator adds up the hours each person spends in recurring meetings per week and compares that with a reference rhythm. Half the reference scores 0, the reference scores 25, twice it scores 50 and two and a half times it scores 100. If you entered decisions for every row, unusually low decision density adds 10 and unusually high density takes 10 off.
Do my salary figures get stored anywhere?
No. Salary is used in your browser to work out the cost and is never sent as a figure. If you use a salary band, only the band label is counted; if you type a figure, nothing about it is stored. Annual cost is recorded only as a wide band, so no combination of fields can reconstruct what a specific team pays its people.
Related tools
- One on One Meeting QuestionsReference. Questions that make a one on one worth having.
- Executive Coaching Cost IndexReference. Published coaching price ranges with sources.
- CEO MastermindProgramme. A peer group for CEOs.
- Leadership Assessment GuideReference. How to assess leadership, and which tool to use.
- Leadership Readiness IndexQuarterly report. The aggregate benchmark built from the assessments.
The numbers behind this tool
Aggregate results are published at Leadership Team Meeting Cost Statistics once a cut reaches 30 completions, under the Leadership Readiness Index methodology. More free tools are at the tools shelf.