Home Alone: 31% of Companies Spend Over $10m on Meetings, and Only 20% Have a Department to Run Them

Nearly a third of large companies spend more than $10 million a year on meetings and events, and only one in five has a department whose job it is to run them. That is the headline from a Skift Meetings survey of in-house corporate event professionals published on 10 September, and it explains a lot about why the CFO keeps asking what all this costs.

Home alone: who actually owns the meetings budget

Skift surveyed 111 in-house corporate event professionals across finance, technology, healthcare and manufacturing for its Corporate Meetings in 2026 report. Just 20% of them work in a formal meetings department. More than half (53%) sit inside marketing, 8% in sales, 4% in HR, and the rest are scattered wherever the org chart had a spare box. The average event team is 11 people.

The money those 11 people move is not small. Of the companies surveyed, 35% spend between $1 million and $5 million a year on meetings, 20% spend $5 million to $10 million, and 31% spend more than $10 million. For comparison, a GBTA and ASTA study put the average total travel and entertainment budget at organisations with more than 1,000 employees at about $2.4 million. Meetings spend, in other words, routinely dwarfs the travel budget it often gets filed under.

And that filing is the problem. Skift's write-up notes that smaller meetings frequently get booked as corporate travel, while sales, marketing and HR each run their own gatherings. Nobody sees the whole number, so nobody owns it, and when the board asks for a return on it, nobody has the spreadsheet.

Flat budgets, rising costs, more events

The squeeze is arithmetic. Almost half of respondents (47%) are working with flat budgets in 2026, and the report adds that 19% have had outright cuts. Only 8% received the 5% to 10% increase that would have kept pace with costs, which 79% of planners say have risen by at least 5% year on year, driven by inflation, tariffs, and pricier flights, AV and catering.

Meanwhile the workload is not shrinking. The vast majority of respondents plan more than ten meetings a year, with an average attendance of 280. Internal and employee meetings top the list, followed by executive and board sessions, customer and user events, and trade show activity, with a long tail of VIP dinners, golf days and advisory boards. Because that calendar is lumpy and project-based, 56% of companies lean on contractors for everything from venue sourcing to staffing the registration desk rather than hiring.

Only 11% of meetings are expected to turn a profit. The majority (56%) are a cost line, and cost lines get scrutinised. The report's contributors describe leadership wanting evidence that the strategy is sound, and wanting it as a number rather than a story.

Eleven people, ten-plus events a year, 280 heads a time, a budget that did not move and a CFO who wants a number: that is not a meetings department, that is a fire brigade with a marketing email address.

What this means for corporate event organisers

Three of the report's findings point at the same practical lever, and it sits in the software line of the budget rather than the catering line.

Pricing and cost structure. Ten meetings a year at 280 people is roughly 2,800 registrations, most of them free to the attendee because the event is a cost centre, not a revenue centre. On platforms that price per registrant, free is not free to you. RegFox, for example, charges $0.99 for every free registrant on its Standard plan, so that calendar costs about $2,770 a year in registration fees before a single paid ticket, and Cvent's per-registrant licence model, which industry write-ups put at roughly $7 to $12 per registrant per event, turns the same calendar into a five-figure line before implementation. A flat subscription does not care how many meetings you run or how many people come. On eventcloud, one user seat is $1,250 a year (£950 or EUR 1,100), and it covers unlimited events and unlimited registrations whether the year holds ten meetings or forty. The bill moves only if you add users, which is the honest edge of the model: an 11-person team where everyone needs a login pays for 11 seats, while a team where two people build events and the rest just receive reports pays for two. You can run your own calendar through the pricing page and the Cvent comparison.

Analytics and reporting. "Proof needs to be a number" is the sentence to pin above the desk. The numbers a platform can give you cheaply are registrations, attendance at the door, no-show rate and revenue where there is any, per event, in one place. If your ten meetings currently live across three tools and a travel-booking system, the ROI story is impossible not because the events failed but because the data is in five places. Consolidating registration onto one system, then exporting everything to Excel for finance, is the boring fix that makes the number exist.

Ease of setup. A team of 11 running ten-plus events with contractors on the desk cannot afford a six-week implementation per event. The survey's staffing picture is an argument for tools that a marketing manager can configure on a Tuesday afternoon: clone last quarter's event, adjust the form, publish. That is a procurement criterion, and it deserves the same weight as feature lists.

What the survey did not say: the contracts problem underneath

A companion piece from the same report, published on 9 September, adds the finding that half of planners have not revised their venue contracts for the current risk environment, leaving gaps in force majeure, attrition, cancellation, deposit and newer cyber and AI-liability clauses. A quarter (26%) have cancelled, postponed or relocated an event because leadership was uncomfortable with a destination, which is why 46% are sourcing more domestically and 33% more regionally.

That belongs in the same conversation as the budget, because a cancelled destination event is where per-registrant pricing hurts twice: you have paid per head for registrations that will now be refunded, and whether the platform's own fee comes back on a refunded order depends on the small print of each vendor. A flat subscription does not return anything either, but it never charged you per head in the first place, so the cancellation costs you the venue, not a second platform bill on top.

Where this leaves the "department" question

Skift's data suggests most companies will not create a meetings department this year; 56% would rather hire contractors than headcount. The realistic path is to give the eleven people who already do the work a single system of record and a number they can defend. eventcloud is built for in-person events, so if the programme is mostly on a screen it is the wrong tool. eventcloud does not do virtual or hybrid events. For the ten-a-year, 280-a-time, flat-budget calendar the survey describes, though, the maths of unlimited is the part of the budget that finally stands still.