Salary To Hourly Calculator

What this salary to hourly calculator does

You have a salary. Somebody else has an hourly rate. Or you are staring at a contract offer quoted by the hour and trying to work out whether it beats the salaried job you already have. Either way you need both numbers in the same units before you can think clearly about them.

So you give this one your annual salary and how many hours you work in a normal week. It hands back what that comes to monthly, weekly, daily and hourly.

The tool labels its fields in $, but the arithmetic is currency blind. Salary divided by hours is salary divided by hours whether you are paid in rupees, dollars or pounds. The examples below use plain figures so you can read them in whatever lands in your account.

All of it runs in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored.

How to use it

1. Annual Salary. Your gross yearly pay, before tax and before deductions. Use the headline figure from your contract or offer letter.
2. Hours per Week. Your contracted working week. Forty is the usual full time figure in the United States, 37.5 is common in the UK and in a lot of office work, and 35 turns up across parts of Europe. Put the number that is actually in your contract, not the number you actually work, unless you want the honest version.

Press Calculate. Press Reset to clear it.

Going the other way, from an hourly rate up to a yearly figure with holidays and vacation factored in, our salary calculator does that.

The one line of arithmetic behind it

Your hourly rate is your salary spread over every working hour in the year:

Hourly rate = annual salary ÷ (hours per week × 52)

The rest of the breakdown falls out of that. Weekly is salary over 52. Monthly is salary over 12. Daily is the weekly figure over 5, since the tool assumes a five day week for that row.

At a 40 hour week, 40 × 52 gives you 2,080 hours. That number turns up constantly in payroll, job adverts and salary negotiations, and it is worth knowing where it comes from, because it is a convention rather than a law of nature.

2,080 or 2,087? There is no single right answer

Here is something that surprises people. Two payroll departments can take the same salary, the same 40 hour week, and produce different hourly rates. Both are correct. They are dividing by different numbers.

Ten cents an hour between the top and the bottom. Which sounds like nothing until you multiply it back out across a full year, where it is roughly $201.

Why does 2,087 exist at all? Because 52 weeks is not quite a year. A calendar year is 52 weeks and a day, or two days in a leap year, so the count of actual weekdays drifts between 260 and 262. Rather than let federal pay wobble year to year, the rule averages it out and freezes the divisor. Tidy solution to a genuinely annoying problem.

For comparing job offers, 2,080 is the right choice, because it is what everyone else quotes. If you work for the US federal government and your payslip disagrees with this tool by a few cents, 2,087 is why.

A worked example: $60,000 a year

Take a $60,000 salary and a 40 hour week.

Weekly is 60,000 ÷ 52 = $1,153.85.

Monthly is 60,000 ÷ 12 = $5,000.00.

Daily is the weekly figure over 5 days, so 1,153.85 ÷ 5 = $230.77.

Hourly is the weekly figure over your hours, so 1,153.85 ÷ 40 = $28.85.

You can get to the same place in one step: 60,000 ÷ 2,080 = $28.85. Same number, fewer keystrokes, and it is the version worth memorising because it lets you sanity check any salary in your head. Halve the thousands and you are roughly there. $60,000 is about $30 an hour, $80,000 is about $40, and so on. The real figure sits a little under the shortcut, but it is close enough to know whether an offer is in the right postcode.

What a salary comes to per hour

Common salaries at common working weeks, so you can find yours without typing:

Read across a row and you can see the thing nobody mentions in a job offer. The same $100,000 is $54.95 an hour on a 35 hour week and $42.74 on a 45 hour week. The salary did not change. The price of your time did, by more than twelve dollars an hour.

Which is the whole argument for converting to hourly before you compare two offers. Salaries hide how much of your week they are buying.

Where your time off sits in this number

A salaried job normally pays you the same whether you are at your desk or on a beach. Your holidays and vacation are already inside the $60,000, which is why this calculator divides by the full 52 weeks rather than deducting anything.

That is the right treatment for salaried employment, and it is also why a salaried hourly rate and a contractor's hourly rate are not comparable at face value. The contractor at $28.85 an hour with no paid leave and no benefits is being paid noticeably less than the salaried employee at $28.85, because the employee gets paid for days they are not working.

If you want to price that difference properly, run your salary through this tool to get your hourly, then put that hourly into our salary calculator with your real holiday and vacation days. The adjusted column shows what an equivalent contract rate would need to be.

Worth remembering too that paid leave is only one of the things sitting inside a salary. Employer pension contributions, health cover, sick pay and payroll taxes are all real money that never appears on your payslip as pay.

Questions people ask

What is $60,000 a year per hour?

$28.85 an hour on a standard 40 hour week, which is 60,000 divided by 2,080 hours. On a 37.5 hour week the same salary is $30.77.

Why divide by 52 weeks and not subtract holidays?

Because a salary already covers your paid time off. Deducting holidays would count them twice. For unpaid leave, see the section above.

Is this gross or take home?

Gross. Everything here is before income tax, social contributions, pension and anything else your employer deducts.

Does it work for part time hours?

Yes. Enter your actual contracted hours. A 20 hour week on a $30,000 salary gives $28.85 an hour, the same as $60,000 at 40 hours, which is a neat way of seeing that part time work is not automatically worse paid per hour.

What if I regularly work more than my contracted hours?

Then enter the hours you actually work rather than the ones in your contract. The number will drop, and that drop is the honest price of the extra time. It is an uncomfortable calculation and a useful one.

Does it work in other currencies?

Yes. The fields are labelled $but the maths is just division. Any currency works.

References

A note on the conventions used. The 40 hour workweek and the definition of compensable hours come from the Fair Labor Standards Act as administered by the US Department of Labor. The 2,087 hour divisor and the reasoning behind it are set out by the Office of Personnel Management and fixed in federal regulation. The 2,088 hour variant is documented by the City of New York.

1. 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/
2. Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, 5 CFR § 550.113, Computation of Overtime Pay. https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/5/550.113
3. 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
4. City of New York, Office of Payroll Administration, Pay Rate Calculator. https://www.nyc.gov/site/opa/my-pay/pay-rate-calculator.page