💼 Hourly to Salary Calculator

What This Calculator Does

This calculator converts between hourly wages and salaries in both directions. Enter an hourly rate with your hours per week, and it shows the weekly, monthly, and annual pay it adds up to. Or enter an annual salary and see the hourly rate it works out to. Both views use your real hours — not just the standard 40 — so the numbers match your actual situation.

This conversion is the key to comparing job offers fairly: an hourly role and a salaried role cannot be judged against each other until they are in the same units. It also answers the everyday question of what a wage “really means” over a year, which is surprisingly hard to feel from the hourly number alone.

How the Conversion Works

The full-time US benchmark is 2,080 hours per year — 40 hours a week times 52 weeks — so an hourly rate times 2,080 gives the standard annual equivalent: $15/hour is $31,200, $20 is $41,600, $30 is $62,400. The reverse divides salary by hours: $50,000 over 2,080 hours is about $24.04/hour. A useful mental shortcut is doubling the hourly rate in thousands — $25/hour ≈ $50K — which comes from the roughly 2,000 working hours in a year.

The reason the calculator asks for your hours rather than assuming 40 is that real schedules differ, and the difference compounds enormously over a year. At 32 hours a week, $25/hour is $41,600, not $52,000; at 50 hours, a $60,000 salary is really $23.08/hour, not $28.85. Part-time work, reduced schedules, and consistent overtime all shift the true conversion, and using your actual hours is what makes the comparison honest.

Comparing Pay Like It Matters

The classic use is weighing a salaried offer against hourly work. Convert both to the same basis — annual or hourly — using the hours each actually demands. A $65,000 salary sounds better than $30/hour until you learn the salaried role expects 50-hour weeks: that is $25/hour against the hourly job's $30. Salaried roles typically do not pay overtime, so the hours assumption is not a detail — it is the comparison. Doing this math before accepting an offer is one of the highest-value five minutes in a job search.

Keep the comparison on gross pay, then factor the rest separately. These conversions are before taxes — take-home depends on federal and state taxes and withholdings that vary widely (state income tax alone ranges from zero to over 10%). Benefits also carry real value: employer health insurance, retirement matching, and paid time off can be worth thousands a year and often favor salaried positions. The clean method: compare gross pay per hour first with this calculator, then weigh benefits and stability as the second layer. Together they give a true picture no single headline number provides.

The 2,080-Hour Year Versus Your Real Year

The standard conversion assumes 2,080 paid hours, and it is worth understanding when that assumption bends. Salaried employees with paid time off genuinely receive their salary across vacations and holidays, so their effective hourly rate for hours actually worked is higher than the naive division — a $52,000 salary with three weeks off and ten holidays is about $27.50 per worked hour, not $25. Hourly workers face the mirror image: unpaid holidays, gaps between shifts, or seasonal slowdowns mean fewer than 52 paid weeks, which the calculator's weeks-per-year field exists to capture. Entering 48 or 50 weeks instead of 52 often models an hourly year far more truthfully.

The comparison sharpens further for contractors and freelancers, where the headline rate must fund everything an employer normally covers: both halves of payroll taxes (self-employment tax runs about 15.3% on net earnings), health insurance, retirement, equipment, and unpaid admin time. The working rule of thumb is that an independent rate needs to run roughly 25–50% above an equivalent employee wage to break even — $40/hour freelance is not $40/hour employed. So when using this calculator across different work arrangements, convert to gross annual figures first, then mentally tag each with what it does and does not include. The arithmetic is identical; the honesty is in what you feed it.

Quick Tips

• Full-time benchmark: hourly rate × 2,080 = annual (40 hrs × 52 weeks).
• Quick estimate: double the hourly rate to get the salary in thousands ($25/hr ≈ $50K).
• Always compare offers using the hours each role actually demands.
• These are gross figures — taxes and benefits change the take-home picture.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I convert hourly pay to annual salary?

Multiply your hourly rate by hours per week, then by weeks worked per year. At $20/hour for a standard 40-hour week and 52 weeks, that is 20 x 40 x 52 = $41,600 per year. The calculator does this with your actual hours.

What is $25 an hour annually?

At 40 hours a week, 52 weeks: $52,000 per year, or about $4,333 a month. A handy shortcut for full-time US work: hourly rate x 2,080 (or roughly x 2,000 for a quick mental estimate).

How do I convert a salary to an hourly rate?

Divide the annual salary by your yearly hours. A $60,000 salary over 2,080 hours (40 x 52) is about $28.85 per hour. This is the number to use when comparing a salaried offer against hourly work.

Is this before or after taxes?

Before. These are gross pay conversions — take-home pay depends on federal and state taxes, benefits, and withholdings that vary by person and state. Use the gross figures to compare offers on equal footing, and expect net pay to be meaningfully lower.

Clear, Instant, and Free

This calculator runs entirely in your browser, converting with your real hours the moment you type. It needs no account or download and works on any device. Like every tool here, it is free to use as often as you like.

Related Tools

For more work and money tools, the overtime pay calculator handles time-and-a-half, the pay raise calculator shows what a raise is worth, and the freelance rate calculator prices independent work.