Not all meetings cost the same. A one-hour engineering sprint planning session might cost your company $625, while a similar sales team meeting costs $340, and an executive strategy session costs $900. Based on data from over 2,000 meetings tracked on our platform, we've identified clear patterns in how meeting costs vary across industries and team types.

Understanding these differences isn't just academically interesting—it's crucial for making smart decisions about when to meet, who to invite, and how long meetings should last. A meeting that makes perfect sense for a sales team might be prohibitively expensive for an engineering team.

Engineering Teams: The Most Expensive Meetings

Engineering teams consistently have the highest per-person meeting costs in our dataset. Based on our preset calculations and real-world data:

Why are engineering meetings so expensive? Several factors contribute:

• High base salaries: Software engineers command premium salaries, typically $150,000-$200,000+ for mid-level to senior positions
• Opportunity cost multiplier: Every hour in a meeting is an hour not shipping code, which has high opportunity costs for product development
• Context switching penalty: Engineers need deep focus time, and meetings fragment their day, reducing overall productivity by 30-40%
• Team size: Engineering meetings often involve entire teams or squads of 5-8 people

A typical engineering team might have: daily standups (15 minutes), sprint planning (2 hours bi-weekly), sprint retrospectives (1 hour bi-weekly), backlog grooming (1 hour weekly), and architecture discussions (2-4 hours monthly). That's approximately 10 hours of meetings per person per week, costing around $65,000 per engineer annually, or $325,000 for a team of five.

Sales Teams: Volume-Driven Costs

Sales teams have a different meeting cost profile. While individual rates are lower, the volume of meetings is often higher:

Sales teams have unique meeting dynamics:

• Client-facing meetings: Many sales meetings are with prospects or customers, which have direct revenue implications and often positive ROI
• High meeting volume: Sales professionals spend 40-60% of their time in meetings, both internal and external
• Lower opportunity cost for internal meetings: Unlike engineering, sales meetings often have clearer, more immediate outcomes (deals closed, pipeline built)
• Deal reviews and forecasting: Regular pipeline reviews are essential but can be time-consuming

The key metric for sales teams isn't total meeting cost—it's the ratio of internal meetings to client-facing meetings. High-performing sales teams we've tracked spend 70% of meeting time with clients and only 30% on internal coordination. Low performers flip this ratio, spending more time in internal meetings than actually selling.

Executive Teams: Premium Hourly Rates, Strategic Value

Executive meetings command the highest hourly rates but often deliver outsized strategic value:

Executive meeting economics are different from individual contributor teams:

• High stakes, high value: A single executive decision can impact millions in revenue or costs, making even expensive meetings worthwhile
• Information density: Executive meetings consolidate information from across the organization, creating leverage
• Meeting-heavy roles: Executives spend 60-80% of their time in meetings by necessity—coordination and decision-making are core functions
• Multiplier effect: Executive decisions cascade throughout the organization, multiplying their impact

The challenge for executive teams isn't reducing total meeting time—it's ensuring meeting time is spent on strategic decisions rather than operational details that could be delegated. We've found that the most effective executive teams have clear decision-making frameworks and ruthlessly delegate anything that doesn't require C-level attention.

Cross-Functional Teams: The Hidden Cost Multiplier

The most expensive meetings in our dataset aren't single-team meetings—they're cross-functional meetings that pull together people from multiple departments:

Cross-functional meetings are necessary but expensive. They're worth the cost when they prevent misalignment or enable critical coordination. They're wasteful when they're used for information sharing that could happen asynchronously. The best companies limit cross-functional meetings to decision-making and use async tools for status updates.

Industry Benchmarks: How Much Should You Spend?

Based on our analysis of 2,000+ meetings, here are healthy meeting cost benchmarks as a percentage of total salary costs:

• Engineering teams: 15-20% of total salary costs should go to meetings. Higher than 25% indicates meeting overload.
• Sales teams: 30-40% is normal given the collaborative nature of sales, but internal meetings shouldn't exceed 15% of time.
• Executive teams: 60-70% is expected. Below 50% might indicate insufficient coordination; above 80% suggests too many low-value meetings.
• Product teams: 20-30% is typical, with healthy tension between building time and coordination time.
• Support teams: 10-15%, as most time should be spent directly serving customers.

If your team exceeds these benchmarks, it doesn't necessarily mean you're wasteful—but it does mean you should audit your meetings and ensure each one delivers value proportional to its cost.

The Annual Meeting Budget: Real Numbers

Let's look at what meeting costs actually mean at the company level. For a 50-person company with a typical team breakdown:

For a 50-person company with $10M in payroll, spending $3.6M on meetings means meetings are your second-largest expense category after base compensation. This isn't inherently bad—collaboration is essential—but it deserves the same scrutiny you'd give any multi-million dollar budget line item.

Making Team-Specific Meeting Decisions

Understanding these cost differences should inform your meeting culture:

For engineering teams: Protect deep work time ruthlessly. Consider async standups, shorter sprint ceremonies, and "no meeting" blocks. Every meeting should have a clear technical decision or blocker to resolve.

For sales teams: Optimize internal meetings to maximize client-facing time. Use CRM updates instead of verbal pipeline reviews. Make weekly sales meetings crisp and action-oriented.

For executive teams: Focus on strategic decisions, not operational updates. Use dashboards and written memos for information sharing. Apply the "disagree and commit" principle to keep decision-making meetings efficient.

For cross-functional teams: Establish clear decision rights to minimize the need for everyone to be in every meeting. Use DACI or RACI frameworks to clarify who needs to attend versus who can be informed asynchronously.

Conclusion: Know Your Numbers

Meeting costs vary dramatically by industry and team type, from $85/hour for sales teams to $225/hour for executives. These differences aren't just academic—they should fundamentally shape how you think about meeting culture.

The companies that manage meeting costs effectively don't try to eliminate meetings—they match meeting investment to potential value, and they're especially careful with expensive engineering and executive time. Start by calculating your team's specific meeting costs, then compare against benchmarks to identify optimization opportunities.