What does that meeting cost a year?
An hour reads as an hour to everyone in it. The same hour weekly with eight people is several weeks of somebody's year — and the levers multiply.
What that recurring meeting costs a year
An hour reads as an hour to everyone in it, and as a salary line to nobody. This does the multiplication.
If you changed it
How this is calculated
cost per meeting = attendees × (minutes + prep) ÷ 60 × loaded hourly rate
cost per year = cost per meeting × times a year
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.
Preparation is where the cost usually hides. A thirty-minute meeting that needs an hour of reading costs three times what the calendar entry suggests.
The annual number is the one that lands
Nobody objects to an hour. The same hour, weekly, with eight people, is several weeks of one person's year, and that framing changes the conversation entirely.
It is not an argument for cancelling meetings. It is an argument for knowing what they cost, so that a meeting worth the money is defended on those terms and one that is not can be dropped without a fight.
The levers multiply
Halving the attendees and halving the length does not halve the cost, it quarters it. Add fortnightly instead of weekly and you are at an eighth.
That is why the smallest changes are worth making first: two people who do not need to be there, fifteen minutes trimmed, and the meeting costs a third of what it did with nobody feeling it.
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.