Hourly to Salary Calculator

At $45/hour and 40 hours a week with no unpaid time off, the arithmetic gives $93,600 a year. That looks like it beats a $90,000 salaried offer by $3,600. Take two unpaid weeks and the working year drops to 50 weeks: $45 × 40 × 50 = $90,000. The advantage is gone entirely, and it was never a rate difference — it was a working-weeks assumption.

Now put the salaried offer's paid leave back in. If that $90,000 role includes three weeks of paid vacation plus statutory holidays, the salaried worker is earning $90,000 for roughly 47 worked weeks, an effective $47.87 per worked hour. To match that hourly, the contract rate has to clear roughly $48, not $45 — and that is before any employer-paid benefits enter the picture.

This is why the conversion runs in both directions on this page. Going from hourly to annual answers "what does my rate add up to"; going from annual back to hourly answers the more useful question, "what would I need to charge to match this job".

This calculator reports gross compensation. On the salaried side, the employer typically also pays part of health coverage, contributes to a retirement plan, covers payroll taxes on their half, and funds equipment, software, and training. None of that appears in the salary figure, and all of it becomes your expense the moment you go independent.

As a rough planning frame, benefits and employer-side payroll costs commonly add somewhere in the region of 20-30% on top of a salary — the exact figure depends entirely on the employer, the country, and the plan, so treat it as a range to investigate rather than a number to rely on. The practical consequence is that a contract rate matching a salary hour-for-hour usually represents a pay cut once you fund your own equivalent of those items.

The bonus field exists for exactly this reason. Use it to model the cushion you need rather than as a hoped-for extra: put your estimated benefit replacement cost in it and see what the honest annual equivalent becomes.

The conversion assumes a steady weekly hour count. If your hours swing — seasonal peaks, on-call weeks, variable shifts — a single weekly figure will mislead in whichever direction you happen to pick. Run the calculation twice, once on a realistic quiet week and once on a busy one, and treat the pair as a range rather than averaging them into a number that describes neither.

Overtime deserves its own pass rather than being folded into the base. If a meaningful share of your income comes from premium hours, model base hours first, then add the premium separately, because overtime is the first thing to disappear when a business slows down. A budget built on a year of heavy overtime is a budget that breaks in the first quiet quarter.

It is a gross-pay conversion, so it says nothing about take-home. Income tax, payroll deductions, and where you live change the net figure substantially, and two identical salaries in different jurisdictions do not land the same amount in your account. Use a take-home calculator for that.

It also cannot tell you whether a rate is competitive. It converts between units; it has no view on what your market pays. Nor does it price self-employment properly: a freelancer needs to cover unpaid admin time, gaps between contracts, and business expenses out of the same rate, which is a different calculation from converting employment hours into a yearly figure.

Where it is genuinely reliable is unit conversion — comparing two offers quoted differently, checking whether a raise keeps pace with an hours change, or translating a rate into the monthly number your budget actually uses.