Costing a recurring meeting
Nobody objects to an hour. The same hour, weekly, with eight people, is several weeks of somebody's year.
The annual number is the one that lands
Per-meeting cost reads as unremarkable. The annual figure changes the conversation, because it turns an hour that felt free into a salary line somebody has to justify.
This is not an argument for cancelling meetings. It is an argument for knowing the price, so a meeting worth the money can be defended on those terms and one that is not can be dropped without an argument.
Use loaded cost, not salary
Salary alone understates the real figure by roughly a third once employment costs, equipment and space are counted — and it understates it in the direction that keeps the meeting.
If you only have salary figures, adding about 30% gets you close enough for a decision.
Preparation is where the cost hides
A thirty-minute meeting that needs an hour of reading costs three times what the calendar entry suggests. Prep time is real work, it is rarely counted, and it is often the larger number.
The levers multiply
Halving the attendees and halving the length does not halve the cost, it quarters it. Make it fortnightly as well and you are at an eighth.
That is why the small changes are worth making first: two people who did not need to be there, fifteen minutes trimmed, and the meeting costs a third of what it did with nobody feeling the difference.
A saving here is time, not money
Nobody is paid less because a meeting was shortened. The hours only become value if they go somewhere useful, and freed time that fills with other meetings has saved nothing at all.
Treat the figure as the price of the meeting rather than a cheque waiting to be collected. It is the right number for deciding whether to keep it and the wrong one to put in a savings plan.
Attending is a decision with a default of yes
The cost calculation makes something visible that is otherwise diffuse: each additional attendee multiplies the cost of the same hour, and the marginal person is usually the one with the least reason to be there. Eight people in a room where three are deciding and five are informed is not a meeting with eight participants; it is a decision plus a five-person broadcast that could have been two paragraphs.
The reason it happens is that the default is inclusion. Adding somebody costs the organiser nothing and risks nothing, while leaving somebody out is a visible social act that might cause offence. So invitation lists ratchet upwards and never down. Making the number concrete is one of the few things that pushes back, because "this recurring meeting costs about forty thousand a year" is an argument and "there are rather a lot of people on this invite" is not.
Recurring meetings do not end on their own
A one-off meeting finishes. A recurring one continues until somebody actively cancels it, and cancelling requires a person to decide it is no longer needed, own that decision, and tell everyone — which is enough friction that it mostly does not happen. Meetings therefore outlive their reasons routinely, and the annual figure is the accumulated cost of that inertia.
The cheap defence is an end date at the outset. A weekly set up to run for eight weeks with a deliberate decision to renew costs nothing extra to arrange and inverts the default: continuing now requires the action, rather than stopping. Where that is not practical, putting the annual cost in the invitation itself is a reasonable substitute — it means everyone who joins is told what the series is worth, and somebody eventually does the arithmetic.