Why calculate the Standup Tax?

Recurring standups consume team time, but there is no honest universal number for what they cost or what changing them would save.

When 10 engineers spend 15 minutes talking, you aren't spending 15 minutes. You are spending 2.5 hours of engineering capacity.

The model

scheduled = team × duration × meetings/year × hourly rate
refocus   = team × optional refocus × meetings/year × hourly rate
gross     = scheduled + refocus
alternative coordination = gross × coordination %
estimated difference = gross − alternative coordination

The headline is the estimated capacity difference produced by those inputs. It is not an observation of waste or savings. A standup may create value, and removing one may create other coordination work that this simple model cannot observe.

Every assumption, and where it comes from

• Hourly rate (default $120): fully loaded — salary, benefits, equity, overhead. Not the salary divided by 2080. Replace the default with a defensible number for your team.
• Working weeks (default 46): 52 minus roughly two weeks of public holidays and four weeks of vacation and sick leave. Adjust it to the calendar your team actually observes.
• Optional refocus (default 0): research on unplanned interruptions does not establish a universal recovery penalty for a scheduled standup. The model therefore excludes it by default. Add a value only to test an explicit scenario you can defend.
• Alternative coordination (default 25%): this is an editable modeling choice, not a research finding. It represents time that may reappear as written updates, threads, DMs or targeted conversations when a recurring meeting changes.

What this tool will not do

It will not tell you standups are worthless, call modeled time observed waste, or pretend the estimated difference converts one-for-one into shipped features. It does not measure meeting value, morale, velocity or business outcomes. An auditable scenario can support a conversation; it cannot settle that conversation by itself.