Meeting Statistics 2026: Time, Cost, and Overload
Employees average 17.7 meetings a week, totaling 18 hours, and say about a third of them could be skipped (Steven Rogelberg and Otter.ai, The Cost of Unnecessary Meeting Attendance, 2022). Knowledge workers rate meetings ineffective 72% of the time (Atlassian survey of 5,000 knowledge workers, 2024). And 57% of meetings are now ad hoc calls with no calendar invite (Microsoft, Breaking Down the Infinite Workday, 2025).
Here are the meeting statistics worth citing in 2026, sourced inline with the year noted, plus one famous figure traced to where it came from.
How many hours people spend in meetings
18 hours a week is the average across all employees: 13.7 hours for non-managers and 22.2 hours for managers with four or more direct reports (Rogelberg and Otter.ai, 2022). That is more than one-third of working hours. The survey covered 632 employees in more than 20 industries.
Nearly 23 hours a week is what executives spend in meetings, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s (Harvard Business Review, 2017). The figure is old, but it is still the canonical one for executives.
59% of enterprise employees spend five or more hours a week in meetings, against 32% at small and midsize businesses (Calendly, State of Meetings, 2024). Calendly sells scheduling software, so read it as interested-party data (1,244 US and UK workers).
How many meetings people have per week
11.8 of those 17.7 weekly meetings are ones employees consider critical to attend. The other 5.3 meetings (5.7 hours) could have been skipped as long as they were kept in the loop (Rogelberg and Otter.ai, 2022).
46% of workers have three or more meetings a day (Calendly, 2024).
Five online or hybrid meetings a week is the average for US knowledge workers (Owl Labs, State of Hybrid Work, 2025).
1 in 10 scheduled meetings is booked at the last minute, and large meetings of 65 or more attendees are the fastest-growing type (Microsoft, 2025). Microsoft’s figures are Microsoft 365 telemetry, not survey answers.
How many meetings are unproductive
72% of the time, meetings are ineffective, according to 5,000 knowledge workers on four continents (Atlassian, 2024). Atlassian sells collaboration software.
78% say they are expected to attend so many meetings that it is hard to get their work done, and 51% work overtime at least a few days a week because of meeting overload. Among directors and above, that rises to 67% (Atlassian, 2024).
77% are frequently in meetings that end in a decision to schedule a follow-up meeting, 54% frequently leave without a clear idea of next steps, and 62% often attend meetings with no goal stated in the invite (Atlassian, 2024).
71% of senior managers said meetings are unproductive and inefficient, 65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work, and 64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking (Harvard Business Review, 2017, a survey of 182 senior managers).
Employees want to decline 31% of meeting invitations but actually decline 14%. They accept 83% (Rogelberg and Otter.ai, 2022).
70% of the time spent in an unnecessary meeting goes to multitasking (Rogelberg and Otter.ai, 2022).
27% of desk workers, and 55% of executives, say they spend too much time in meetings. More than two hours of meetings a day is the tipping point at which a majority feel overburdened (Slack Workforce Index, 2023, a survey of 10,333 desk workers).
What meetings cost
$80,000 per professional employee per year is what companies pay for meeting attendance, and $25,000 of it (31%) goes to meetings the employee considers unnecessary (Rogelberg and Otter.ai, 2022).
Over $100 million a year is the potential saving for a company of 5,000 people, and over $2 million for a company of 100 (Otter.ai’s release of the same study, 2022).
2.8 hours a week go to unnecessary meetings for the average knowledge worker, and 3.6 hours for senior leaders (Asana, Anatomy of Work Global Index, 2023, a survey of 9,615 knowledge workers).
$541 billion was Doodle’s estimate of employee time lost to pointless meetings in 2019, or 24 billion hours (Doodle, State of Meetings, 2019). Doodle sells scheduling software, and the figure predates the remote-work shift.
Where the “$37 billion wasted on meetings” figure comes from
The claim that the US wastes $37 billion a year on unproductive meetings is everywhere, usually credited to an Atlassian infographic. Lucid Meetings traced it and could not reproduce the number from any of the studies the infographic cites. The earliest appearance they found was a 1989 Industry Week article titled “A $37 billion waste,” which lists no source for it.
So the figure is 37 years old and has no published method. The $25,000 per employee figure (Rogelberg and Otter.ai, 2022) is the one with a method behind it.
How remote and hybrid work changed meetings
Meetings per person rose 12.9% and attendees per meeting rose 13.5% after the 2020 lockdowns, while average meeting length fell 20.1%, across 3,143,270 users in 16 cities (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2020). Net time in meetings per day fell 11.5% in that post-lockdown period.
Weekly meeting time then rose 252% for the average Microsoft Teams user in the two years after February 2020, and the number of weekly meetings rose 153% (Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2022).
30% of meetings now span multiple time zones, up 8 percentage points since 2021, and meetings starting after 8 p.m. are up 16% year over year (Microsoft, 2025).
Six minutes is what in-office workers spend getting each hybrid meeting started, 27% spend 10 minutes or more, and 77% have lost time to meetings that started late because of technical difficulties (Owl Labs, 2025). Owl Labs sells meeting-room cameras.
45% of US office and hybrid workers report meetings that start late because of tech or audio issues, and 77% hit tech issues in at least one meeting every week (Jabra, US Modern Workplace Report, 2026, a survey of 1,000 workers). Jabra sells meeting audio hardware.
What time of day and week meetings happen
50% of all meetings take place between 9 and 11 a.m. or 1 and 3 p.m. (Microsoft, 2025). Tuesday carries 23% of the week’s meetings and Friday just 16%.
Do meeting-free days work
47% of 76 large companies that introduced no-meeting days cut their meetings by 40% with two meeting-free days a week. The authors found the best results at three (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2022).
80% of knowledge workers say they would be more productive with less time in meetings, and 80% say most of their meetings could be done in half the time (Atlassian, 2024).
81% of workers also say that more productive meetings would help them in some way (Calendly, 2024).
How much time scheduling meetings takes
43% of workers spend at least three hours a week just scheduling meetings, up from 36% a year earlier. At enterprise companies the share is 35% (Calendly, 2024).
Taking the scheduling back-and-forth off the calendar
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FAQ
How much time do people spend in meetings? Employees average 18 hours a week across 17.7 meetings (Rogelberg and Otter.ai, 2022). Executives spend nearly 23 hours a week (Harvard Business Review, 2017).
What percentage of meetings are unproductive? Knowledge workers say meetings are ineffective 72% of the time (Atlassian, 2024). Employees say about 31% of their meetings could be skipped entirely (Rogelberg and Otter.ai, 2022), and 71% of senior managers call meetings unproductive and inefficient (Harvard Business Review, 2017).
How much do unnecessary meetings cost? About $25,000 per employee per year, out of roughly $80,000 that companies pay per professional for meeting attendance (Rogelberg and Otter.ai, 2022). The viral “$37 billion” figure dates to a 1989 magazine article with no source.
Did remote work increase meetings? Yes. Meetings per person rose 12.9% right after the 2020 lockdowns (NBER, 2020), and weekly meeting time for the average Teams user rose 252% in the two years after February 2020 (Microsoft, 2022). By 2025, 30% of meetings spanned multiple time zones (Microsoft, 2025).
Related: Email Statistics · Productivity Statistics · Time Management Statistics · Context Switching Statistics · Remote Work Statistics
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