Hourly to salary calculator

How to convert an hourly wage to a salary

Annual salary is hourly wage × hours per week × paid weeks per year. The other figures follow from it: weekly pay is wage × weekly hours, a biweekly paycheck is two weeks of that, monthly pay is the annual total divided by 12 (months are not exactly four weeks), and daily pay is the weekly amount divided by the days you work.

Worked example with the defaults: $25 an hour × 40 hours = $1,000 a week. Over 52 paid weeks that is $52,000 a year, or $4,333.33 a month, $2,000 every two weeks and $200 for each of five working days. A full-time year of 40 × 52 is 2,080 hours, the figure most US employers use to convert between hourly and salaried pay.

The first row is the US federal minimum wage of $7.25, which at full time comes to $15,080 a year before tax.

Getting a realistic number

The quick rule of thumb, wage × 2,000, works for a 40-hour job with two unpaid weeks off: $25 becomes roughly $50,000. If your time off is paid, keep 52 weeks; if you are paid only for the hours you work, subtract every week of unpaid leave, public holidays you are not paid for and expected sick days. Hourly contracts with variable schedules are better estimated from your average weekly hours over the last few months than from the contract minimum.

Monthly pay and four weekly paychecks are not the same thing. A year has 52 weeks, so a month averages 4.33 weeks; four or five months a year contain five Fridays, and a worker paid every Friday receives a fifth paycheck in each of them. Biweekly pay produces 26 paychecks a year, and in two months you receive three.

All results are gross. Take-home pay is lower after income tax, social insurance and any pension or health contributions, and overtime above 40 hours is usually paid at a higher rate that this conversion does not include.