Three strategies, priced on the same required days

Most return-to-office calculators only answer one question: what does going into the building cost you. This one puts three real strategies side by side using the same required days: showing up in full, coffee badging (badge in, stay briefly, leave), and a hypothetical – what those same required days would cost if your company let you work them from home instead. Each column shows the annual cost of that strategy and how many office hours a week it actually involves, so the comparison is never just one number in isolation.

Change how long you actually stay

The dwell-time slider controls how long you stay on a day you badge in, and every number on the page recalculates as you move it. With the default pattern of badging two out of three required days and staying about an hour each time, a $23 visit against a $55 full office day works out to roughly $3,328 saved a year and about 728 hours reclaimed, at the calculator’s starting defaults. Every one of those starting numbers is editable, so replace them with your own the moment they stop matching your situation. Stay longer and the savings shrink; leave sooner and both the savings and the reclaimed hours grow.

Know your break-even point

Coffee badging only beats a full office day for as long as one visit costs less than what a full day would cost you. The calculator states that threshold directly, alongside what your current visit actually costs, so you can see how much room you have before the math stops working in your favor.

See the price of the hours you get back

Saving money and reclaiming time are not the same thing, so the calculator keeps them separate and then shows what one costs in terms of the other: the dollar amount you are effectively paying, or saving, for every hour you get back compared to a full office day. A cheap visit that still eats most of the day returns little time for the money; a short visit returns a lot of time even if it saves less.

Switch the enforcement view without a fake percentage

Nobody outside HR knows the exact dwell-time threshold their company enforces, and most companies never publish one. Instead of guessing at a risk score, the enforcement panel lets you pick Low, Medium, or Strict and shows what is actually documented at that level, with sources, so you can judge for yourself how close it is to your own workplace.