Salary Calculator

What this salary calculator does

Somebody quotes you an hourly rate and your brain immediately tries to turn it into a yearly number, because that is the number you can actually compare against rent, or against the job you already have. Usually the mental maths goes wrong somewhere around the holidays.

So this calculator does it properly. Give it your hourly rate, your hours and days per week, and how many holidays and vacation days you get in a year. Back comes a table of what that is worth hourly, daily, weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly, monthly, quarterly and annually.

Two columns, though, not one. That is the part worth understanding before you read anything else, so it has a section of its own just below.

Everything runs in your browser. Nothing typed here is sent anywhere or stored.

How to use it

1. Salary amount. Your rate per hour. If you are paid a salary rather than an hourly rate, our salary to hourly calculator goes the other direction.
2. Hours per week. Your normal working week. Forty for most full time roles, but put whatever is true for you.
3. Days per week. How those hours are spread. The tool divides one by the other to get your hours per day, so 40 across 5 days gives it 8.
4. Holidays per year. Public holidays and company closure days. Ten is a common figure in the United States.
5. Vacation days per year. Your annual leave allowance in days.

Press Calculate. Press Reset to clear it.

The two columns, and which one is yours

The result table has an Unadjusted column and a Holidays and Vacation Adjusted column. Most people glance at both, decide the first one looks nicer, and move on. They are answering two different questions.

Unadjusted assumes you are paid for all 52 weeks. Your holidays and vacation are paid time off, so taking them costs you nothing. This is the column for salaried staff and for hourly workers whose employer pays for leave.

Adjusted assumes your time off is unpaid. Every holiday and vacation day is a day you do not get paid for, so it comes straight off the total. This is the column for hourly workers without paid leave, contractors, agency staff, and most freelance arrangements.

So before anything else, work out which of those describes you. On our example below the gap between the two columns is $5,000 a year on a $52,000 headline, which is not a rounding error, it is a car.

If some of your time off is paid and some is not, enter only the unpaid days. The tool will treat the rest as covered.

How the yearly figure is built

The arithmetic is short. First your hours per day:

Hours per day = hours per week ÷ days per week

Then your working days in a year, which the tool takes as a flat 52 weeks:

Working days per year = 52 × days per week

And then the two annual figures:

Unadjusted annual = hourly rate × hours per day × working days per year

Adjusted annual = hourly rate × hours per day × (working days per year − holidays − vacation days)

Every other row in the table is one of those two numbers divided down. Weekly is annual over 52, bi-weekly over 26, semi-monthly over 24, monthly over 12, quarterly over 4. No hidden steps.

The 52 is worth a note. A calendar year is 52 weeks and one day, or two days in a leap year, so a real year quietly contains 261 or 262 weekdays rather than a tidy 260. The tool uses the flat 52 because that is what payroll departments and job adverts use, and because you would rather compare two offers on the same basis than be right to the nearest day.

A worked example: $25 an hour

Take $25 an hour, 40 hours across 5 days, 10 public holidays and 15 vacation days. Here is what the calculator returns and where each figure comes from.

Hours per day is 40 ÷ 5 = 8. Working days is 52 × 5 = 260. So the unadjusted annual is 25 × 8 × 260 = $52,000.

Now subtract the 25 days off: 260 − 10 − 15 = 235 paid days. Adjusted annual is 25 × 8 × 235 = $47,000.

Twenty five days of unpaid leave costs $5,000. Which is a useful thing to know when a job offer waves generous vacation at you but does not say whether it is paid.

Everything above is gross, before tax and any deductions.

What the adjusted hourly rate is really telling you

That $22.60 in the adjusted column is the row that confuses everybody, so let us take it apart. It looks like a pay cut. It is not.

You still earn $25 for every hour you actually work. Nothing about your rate changed. What the tool has done is take your $47,000 and spread it across the full standard year of 260 days, or 2,080 hours, as though you had worked all of them.

Check it the other way. You actually worked 235 days at 8 hours, which is 1,880 hours. And $47,000 ÷ 1,880 = $25.00 exactly. Your rate is untouched.

So what is $22.60 for? Comparison. It is the hourly rate a salaried person with fully paid leave would need to earn the same $47,000. When you are weighing a contract role at $25 with no paid leave against a staff job with paid leave, $22.60 is the number that makes them comparable. Read it as an effective rate, not as your rate.

One caveat while you are here. The adjusted hourly and adjusted daily figures are calculated against the working days your own schedule implies, so a 6 day week is divided by 312 days rather than the usual 260. Every row therefore reflects the days you actually entered.

Bi-weekly, semi-monthly, and the month you feel rich

These two rows trip people up because the words sound interchangeable and the numbers are not.

Bi-weekly means every two weeks, so 26 payments a year. Semi-monthly means twice a month, so 24 payments a year. Same annual total, different cheque.

On our $52,000 example, bi-weekly pays $2,000 and semi-monthly pays $2,166.67. That is $166.67 more per cheque on the semi-monthly schedule, which feels like a raise until you notice you are getting two fewer of them.

The interesting bit is what 26 does to your calendar. Twelve months but 26 fortnightly payments means two months in the year contain three paydays instead of two. People tend to budget as though every month has two, then get a pleasant surprise twice a year. If you are on a bi-weekly schedule, those two months are the obvious place to put an annual bill or a chunk of savings, because you have already proved you can live without that money the other ten months.

Semi-monthly has its own quirk. The payday lands on a fixed date rather than a fixed weekday, so it drifts across the week and occasionally onto a weekend, which is why it sometimes shows up a day early or late.

Questions people ask

Which column should I be reading?

Unadjusted if your holidays and vacation are paid, which covers most salaried employment. Adjusted if your time off is unpaid, which covers most hourly, contract and freelance work.

Is $25 an hour a good salary?

At 40 hours a week it is $52,000 a year before tax and before any unpaid leave comes off. Whether that is good depends entirely on where you live and what you do, but the yearly figure is the one to compare against other offers rather than the hourly.

Does this include overtime?

No. It prices your normal week at your normal rate. If you regularly work beyond your standard hours, the extra usually carries a premium, and our time and a half calculator handles that separately.

Is this before or after tax?

Before. Everything shown is gross pay. What lands in your account depends on your tax residence, filing status, pension contributions and a dozen other things this tool cannot see.

Does it work outside the United States?

Yes. The labels say dollars, the arithmetic does not care. Change the holidays and vacation figures to match your own entitlement and the rest follows.

Can I use it for part time work?

Yes, just enter your real hours and days. A 20 hour week over 4 days works exactly the same way.

References

A note on where the conventions come from. The 40 hour workweek and the rules on what counts as paid working time are set by the Fair Labor Standards Act, administered by the US Department of Labor. The standard divisors used to convert between annual and hourly pay are documented by the Office of Personnel Management, which uses 2,087 hours for federal employees by statute rather than the private sector's 2,080.

1. U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, Fact Sheet #22: Hours Worked Under the Fair Labor Standards Act. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/22-flsa-hours-worked
2. U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Computing Hourly Rates of Pay Using the 2087-Hour Divisor. https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/pay-administration/fact-sheets/computing-hourly-rates-of-pay-using-the-2087-hour-divisor/
3. Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, 5 CFR § 550.113, Computation of Overtime Pay. https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/5/550.113
4. U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, Fact Sheet #23: Overtime Pay Requirements of the FLSA. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/23-flsa-overtime-pay