Prorated Salary Calculator

What is a fair share of a month?

You started on the fourteenth. Or you left on the nineteenth. Or you took unpaid leave for a week. Whatever the reason, you worked part of a month and now somebody has to decide what part of a month's salary that is worth.

It sounds like it should have one answer. It does not.

There is no universal law of prorating. There are several perfectly reasonable ways to divide a monthly salary across a month, they are all defensible, they are all in use, and they give materially different numbers on identical facts.

So before anything else on this page, here is what that actually looks like.

Three defensible answers, three different numbers

Same person, same month, same days. Monthly gross of ₹80,000, and 20 paid days in July 2026, a 31 day month with 8 weekend days and therefore 23 working days.

Read the right hand column again. The gap between the top and bottom rows is ₹17,952, on the same salary, for the same twenty days.

That is not a rounding difference or a rival opinion about arithmetic. All three are correct. They are answers to slightly different questions.

Working days asks what fraction of the month's work you did. Twenty days out of the twenty three you were expected to attend.

Calendar days asks what fraction of the month you were employed for. Twenty days out of thirty one, weekends included, since a monthly salary notionally covers the whole month including the days you were not expected in.

Fixed thirty asks nothing in particular and picks a constant, so that every month prorates identically regardless of length. Payroll teams like it because it is predictable and it stops February being strange.

Which means the single most useful thing you can do before arguing about a prorated figure is find out which of the three your employer uses. It should be in your contract or the employee handbook. If it is not, ask, and get the answer in writing, because the difference is more than a fifth of a month's pay.

Which one this calculator uses

The working days method. Explicitly and always.

Prorated salary = (Gross monthly salary / Working days in the month) × Paid days

It works out the working days for you rather than making you count them. It looks up how many days are in the month you chose, walks through every date in it, and counts how many fall on the days you marked as off. Subtract those and you have the working days.

Then it needs your paid days, which it builds from three separate fields:

Paid days = Days worked + Holidays + Approved leaves

That addition carries an assumption worth stating out loud. Public holidays and approved leave are treated as paid. You did not attend, and you get paid anyway, which is what those categories normally mean.

If your leave is unpaid, do not put it in the leaves box. Leave it out entirely, and the day simply does not get counted.

The result is rounded to the nearest whole rupee, since payroll rarely deals in paise.

The day-off dropdowns are doing real work

Choose how many days a week you work and a set of dropdowns appears, one for each day off. This is the part people skip, and skipping it changes your answer.

Those dropdowns are not decoration. The calculator counts how many times each selected weekday actually occurs in the month you picked, and different months contain different numbers of Saturdays and Sundays. July 2026 has eight weekend days. A month starting on a Saturday would have nine or ten.

Here is the part to watch. If you leave the dropdowns unselected, no days are counted as off. The working days figure becomes the full calendar month, and you have quietly switched from the working days method to the calendar days method without meaning to.

Which is why the result tells you how many working days it found. Check that number first. If you work a five day week and it says 31, the dropdowns are empty. If it says 23 for July, they are set correctly.

One more detail on the year. The calculator uses the current year for the month you select. That matters for February, which has 28 days in most years and 29 in a leap year, and it shifts which weekdays fall where in every month. For a past or future year, count the working days by hand and be aware the figure may differ by a day or two.

Eighteen days in July, worked through

Take someone on ₹80,000 a month who worked 18 days in July, had 1 public holiday and 1 day of approved leave, on a five day week with Saturday and Sunday off.

Step one, the working days. July has 31 days. Eight of them fall on a Saturday or Sunday. So 31 minus 8 gives 23 working days.

Step two, the daily rate. ₹80,000 divided by 23 is ₹3,478.26 per working day.

Step three, the paid days. 18 worked, plus 1 holiday, plus 1 leave, is 20 paid days.

Step four. ₹3,478.26 times 20 is ₹69,565.

So a little under 87 percent of a full month's salary, for 20 of the 23 days you were expected.

Sanity check that against the three missing days. Three days at ₹3,478.26 is ₹10,434, and ₹80,000 minus that is ₹69,566. One rupee off the answer above, purely from rounding, which is exactly what you want to see.

Why February is the best month to start a job

Now something genuinely odd that falls straight out of the working days method, and that almost nobody notices until it happens to them.

Because the daily rate is your salary divided by the working days in that particular month, and months contain different numbers of working days, the same number of paid days is worth different amounts depending on when you did them.

Same ₹80,000 salary, same 20 paid days, five day week:

Twenty paid days in February earns you your entire monthly salary, because February only has twenty working days. Twenty paid days in July earns you about 87 percent of it.

Ten thousand rupees of difference for identical effort, decided by the calendar.

None of that is a flaw in the method. It is the method being consistent: you are always paid for the share of that month's expected work that you actually did, and February simply expects less. But it does explain why some payroll teams prefer the fixed thirty day approach, which makes every month behave identically and takes the calendar lottery out of it.

It also explains why a colleague who joined in a different month can end up with a visibly different first payslip on the same salary and the same number of days. Nobody made a mistake.

Questions people ask

How do I know which method my employer uses?

Check the contract or the employee handbook first, then ask HR and get the answer in writing. Divide your prorated pay by your paid days to get the implied daily rate, then divide your monthly salary by that rate. If it comes out near 30, they use a fixed month. Near your working days, they use working days. Near the calendar days, calendar.

Where do unpaid leave days go?

Nowhere. Leave them out of all three boxes. Only paid absence belongs in the holidays and leaves fields.

The working days figure looks wrong.

Almost always the day-off dropdowns. If none are selected, the calculator counts every calendar day as a working day. Set them and recalculate.

I work a six day week.

Set days worked per week to 6 and select the single day you have off. The counting works the same way, you will just have more working days and a lower daily rate.

Can I calculate for a previous year?

The calculator uses the current year for whichever month you pick. For another year, count the working days yourself, since both the number of days in February and the placement of weekends shift year to year.

Is this gross or net?

Whatever you entered. Enter gross and you get gross. Deductions, tax and provident fund contributions all sit outside this arithmetic and are usually applied to the prorated figure afterwards.

Should public holidays really be paid?

Normally yes, and in many jurisdictions it is a statutory entitlement rather than a courtesy. In Nepal, for instance, workers are entitled to a set number of paid public holidays each year. If your employer treats a particular day as unpaid, leave it out of the holidays box.

References

A note on why this page leads with methods rather than a formula. Prorating is a matter of contract and payroll policy rather than a single legal rule, so the honest thing is to show the methods and their consequences. What is fixed by law in most places is the surrounding entitlement: which days count as paid holiday, what leave is paid, and the requirement that pay is due for the period covered. In Nepal those entitlements sit in the Labour Act 2074. Where a partial period is worked, the US Department of Labor's guidance on determining a rate of pay by dividing total compensation by the period it covers is the same reasoning this calculator applies to a month.

1. Government of Nepal, Labour Act 2074 (2017) and Labour Rules 2075 (2018), provisions on remuneration, paid public holidays and leave entitlements.
2. U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, Fact Sheet #56A: Overview of the Regular Rate of Pay Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, on deriving a rate of pay by dividing total compensation by the period it covers. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/56a-regular-rate
3. U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, Wages and the Fair Labor Standards Act, on wages being due on the regular payday for the pay period covered. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/flsa