Use this calculator to easily convert a salary to an hourly rate, and the corresponding daily wage, monthly, weekly, or annual salary. Use it to estimate what hourly rate you need to get to a given salary (yearly, monthly, weekly, etc.), in other words calculate how much is X a year as a per hour wage.
Quick navigation:
- Salary to hourly calculation
- Salary to hourly conversion formula
- Practical examples
- Choosing a good hourly rate
- Consider the employer perspective
- Consider the extra expenses
Salary to hourly calculation
In order to convert your salary to an hourly rate using our salary to hourly calculator, you need to enter a few pieces of information. First, you need to specify the type of salary: yearly, quarterly, monthly, bi-weekly, weekly or daily. Then you need to specify the number of hours per week that you are in fact working. You should be thinking about "billable hours" here, so it is best to not just use whatever is on your job contract: maybe you work overtime, or maybe you happen to work less than the contract states due to specifics of the business or just bad internal organization.
Work days per week are required in order to calculate an equivalent hourly salary. It is worth mentioning that our calculator outputs not just the hourly rate, but also the equivalent daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly salary. Finally, enter at least an approximate number of official holidays per year, assuming you do not work on holidays. Also enter the days you take off work - vacation days. Accounting for these is important for an accurate conversion of a salary to an hourly pay. If you have a days-off calendar handy, you might want to check if some of the holidays also coincide with weekends, since in such cases you must exclude them from the number you input.
Salary to hourly conversion formula
The formula for salary to hourly this calculator uses is:
Hourly Rate = Yearly Salary / ((Hours per Week / Days per Week) x Work Days per Year)
The yearly salary is divided by the number of work hours during the year, where the number of work hours is derived by first calculating the number of work hours per day by dividing the hours per week by the work days per week, and then multiplying by the total number of work days per year. Naturally, we first need to convert your salary to an annual salary, if you enter it in some other fashion.
Practical examples
All of the below examples are calculated under the reasonably realistic assumption of a 40-hour working week with 49 full working weeks per year. This is equivalent to ten working days off and another five days of state holidays coinciding with working days, or three calendar weeks of vacation in total. All numbers are pre-tax.
$40,000 a year is how much an hour?
An yearly salary of $40,000 is equivalent to $20.35 per hour under the assumption of forty-nine full 40-hour working weeks in a year. This is also a monthly salary of about $3,300, a weekly wage of just over $800, and a daily wage of $164.
$45,000 a year is how much an hour?
An annual salary of $45,000 equals a payment of $22.89 per hour under the specified assumptions.
$50,000 a year is how much an hour?
An annual wage of $50,000 equals a payment rate of $25.44 per hour assuming the year has 49 full working weeks of 40 hours each. This is also equivalent to a monthly salary of $4,167 and a weekly salary of $1,039.
$60,000 a year is how much an hour?
An yearly salary of $60,000 equals a payment rate of $30.53 per hour under realistic assumptions.
$70,000 a year is how much an hour?
A pre-tax annual salary of $70,000 equals an hourly of $35.61 assuming one works forty-nine full weeks of forty hours each.
$80,000 a year is how much an hour?
An yearly salary of $80,000 ($6,667 monthly, $1,662 weekly) is equivalent to a rate of $40.70 per hour if one works forty-nine full forty-hour weeks.
Choosing a good hourly rate
As with the price of any good exchanged on a free market, hourly wages are determined primarily by supply and demand, which will be specific to your business niche, your expertise, sometimes to your location and language skills. Generally, the freer an economy is, the more one's human capital plays a role in determining what income one is able to achieve. Your hourly pay is related to your living expenses only in as much as you will most likely be unwilling to work for an hourly rate that will not allow you to support yourself. Naturally, you will also be more inclined to sign a contract for a rate that allows you to also set money aside, so you can start your own business, or buy a nicer house or car, or send your kids to a better college. When considering your hourly rate based on, say, an yearly salary, you should take into account both your regular expenses, as well as expenses that might increase or decrease depending on the volume of work you are doing. This, of course, assumes you are covering some of the costs.
Consider the employer perspective
From the point of view of an employer the calculation is simple: is it more efficient to hire this person at an XX hourly rate, or do I have better options, including just not doing the job, or hiring a less-qualified, but cheaper employee, or considering automating the work. Sometimes an employer would be willing to hire someone at a rate at which the person doesn't necessarily pay for himself through the work directly performed, if that work is absolutely necessary to allow some other activity to happen, which will bring a return that in turn justifies the salary / hourly rate.
The above means that your chosen hourly pay can not be higher than the value you provide to your client, and it should generally include a decent margin which would constitute their profit - a compensation for the risk of undertaking whatever business venture they are in. Obviously, you need to make sure that the rate is such that after expenses you have enough profit left to make working worthwhile.
Consider the extra expenses
If you end up comparing your salary as an employee to hourly rates of consultants and other outside contractors, make sure to account for the expenses they incur which your employer is usually covering for you, such as office space & perks, electronics, software subscriptions, accounting expenses, professional education, certification, and so on. The salary would necessarily be lower than the salary-equivalent of an hourly rate due to these extra expenses, which would otherwise need to be covered separately. Consequently your chosen hourly pay should be higher than an equivalent annual salary in order to account for the extra expenses you would incur.
Before versus after tax income
When using this salary to hourly calculator to calculate your hourly rate based on the desired yearly salary you want, you should always consider the difference between pre-tax and after-tax salary, and hence - hourly. Make sure you account for all applicable local and state taxes imposed on labor. Yes, however illogical it seems due to the economics 101 knowledge that everything you tax tends to diminish, while everything you subsidize tends to grow, labor is taxed in many jurisdictions around the world, suggesting that there is a desire to make people produce less. Just remember that in the end you will not be able to spend the sum written on your salary check or hourly-rate invoice.
