Meeting Statistics 2026: Time, Cost, and Overload
Meetings are the workday’s biggest line item and its biggest complaint. They’re also well studied, so the frustration can be quantified: how many hours they eat, how many are pointless, and what they cost. Below are the meeting statistics worth knowing in 2026 — each sourced inline, with the year noted, and with one famous figure flagged as the myth it is.
How much time meetings really take
About 23 hours a week is what executives now spend in meetings, up from less than 10 hours a week in the 1960s (Harvard Business Review, 2017). More than half the senior workweek is other people’s calendars.
Weekly meeting time rose 252% for the average Microsoft Teams user between February 2020 and 2022, and the number of weekly meetings climbed 153% (Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2022). Remote work didn’t reduce meetings — it roughly tripled them.
Around 18 hours a week is what employees report spending in meetings, of which nearly six hours are seen as unproductive (Otter.ai / Dr. Steven Rogelberg, 2022).
How many meetings are unnecessary
71% of senior managers say meetings are unproductive and inefficient, 65% say meetings keep them from finishing their own work, and 64% say meetings come at the expense of deep thinking (Harvard Business Review, 2017).
About one-third of all meetings are unnecessary (Otter.ai / Rogelberg, 2022). A separate survey of 6,500 professionals put the share workers personally consider pointless even higher, at roughly two-thirds (Doodle, State of Meetings, 2019).
92% of U.S. workers admit to multitasking during meetings, and 41% do it often or all the time (Doodle, 2019) — a fair sign of how engaging the average meeting really is.
What meetings cost
About $25,000 per employee per year is wasted on unnecessary meetings, out of roughly $80,000 a year that companies effectively pay per professional for meeting attendance (Otter.ai / Rogelberg, 2022).
$541 billion was Doodle’s estimate of employee time wasted globally on pointless meetings in a single year (Doodle, State of Meetings, 2019). (Doodle sells scheduling software, so read it as interested-party data — but it’s survey-backed and analyzed 19 million meetings.)
103 hours a year is what the average knowledge worker loses to unnecessary meetings specifically, on top of hundreds of hours lost to duplicated work (Asana, Anatomy of Work, 2023).
The “$37 billion wasted on meetings” myth
You’ll see it everywhere. It doesn’t hold up: the “$37 billion” figure traces through an old infographic back to estimates from the 1980s and 90s, not current data. Use the properly-sourced modern numbers above — roughly a third of meetings unnecessary, about $25,000 per employee a year wasted (Otter.ai / Rogelberg, 2022) — and skip the viral one.
Meetings keep creeping later
16% more meetings now start after 8 p.m. year over year, 57% of meetings are ad-hoc calls with no calendar invite, and 30% of meetings span multiple time zones (Microsoft, Breaking Down the Infinite Workday, 2025). The meeting day no longer fits inside the workday.
The hidden tax: scheduling them
Before a meeting wastes time, booking it already did. Coordinating schedules the old-fashioned way burns roughly 40 hours per person per year, and organizing a single group meeting by email averages about 30 messages (Doodle, 2019). The back-and-forth is a meeting before the meeting.
What the numbers add up to
Half the senior week in meetings, a third of them unnecessary, weekly meeting time up over 250% since 2020, and tens of hours a year lost just scheduling — the cost isn’t any single meeting, it’s the volume and the coordination around it.
That coordination is the part you can actually delegate. Rather than play email tag to find a time, more people hand scheduling to an AI assistant that reads availability, proposes times, books the meeting, and reschedules conflicts on its own. Carly does this over email and text across Gmail and Outlook — see the best AI meeting schedulers and best AI scheduling assistants roundups for how teams are clawing those hours back.
FAQ
How much time do people spend in meetings? Executives spend roughly 23 hours a week in meetings (HBR, 2017), and employees overall report around 18 hours, with nearly six of them unproductive (Otter.ai, 2022).
What percentage of meetings are unnecessary? About one-third by Otter.ai/Rogelberg’s 2022 research; surveyed workers personally rate as many as two-thirds a waste (Doodle, 2019).
How much do meetings cost companies? Roughly $25,000 per employee per year in unnecessary meetings alone (Otter.ai / Rogelberg, 2022). Ignore the viral “$37 billion” figure — it’s based on decades-old estimates.
Did remote work increase meetings? Yes — weekly meeting time for the average Teams user rose 252% from February 2020 to 2022 (Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2022), and meetings have kept spreading into evenings and across time zones since.
Related: Email Statistics 2026 · Productivity Statistics 2026 · Time Management Statistics 2026 · Best AI meeting schedulers · Best AI scheduling assistants
Ready to automate your busywork?
Carly schedules, researches, and briefs you—so you can focus on what matters.
See what people say
"Before Carly, I relied on a Calendly link, but the whole process felt impersonal and not very professional. Carly changed that by handling all the back-and-forth, so I'm no longer stuck in endless email threads trying to line up schedules.
Now Carly reaches out to candidates, shares my real-time availability, lets them pick a slot, then sends a Zoom link and drops it straight into my calendar. She sends reminders to both of us before each call, which has significantly reduced no-shows and last-minute confusion.
On top of scheduling, Carly acts like a full executive assistant, sending me my schedule the night before so I can prepare for each call. It reminds me of the old x.ai assistant, but Carly is noticeably smarter, faster, and better suited to my healthcare recruitment business."
