Convert hourly to salary — and back

Know exactly what a number means per year, month and hour.

“Is $30/hour good?” only makes sense once you see it as a yearly number — and “is $85k a fair offer?” is easier to judge as an hourly rate you can compare to contract work. Pay Converter does both instantly: enter an hourly rate and see the annual, monthly, biweekly and weekly equivalents, or enter a salary and get the hourly rate.

It lets you set the real hours per week and weeks per year (accounting for unpaid time off), so the conversion matches your actual schedule instead of a generic 2,080-hour assumption. Pure math, no signup, nothing sent anywhere.

• ✓Hourly → annual, monthly, biweekly, weekly
• ✓Salary → hourly rate
• ✓Adjustable hours/week and weeks/year
• ✓Instant and private — runs in your browser

Where the standard 2,080 hours comes from — and when it's wrong

Almost every quick conversion multiplies an hourly rate by 2,080, which is 40 hours a week across 52 weeks. It is a reasonable default for a salaried job with paid holiday, because you are paid through the weeks you take off, so the full 52 belong in the calculation.

It is the wrong default for anyone whose time off is unpaid. A contractor taking three weeks unpaid works 49 paid weeks, or 1,960 hours, and the same hourly rate produces about 6% less over the year than the standard conversion suggests. On a $50/hour rate that is roughly $6,000 — the entire gap between two offers people agonise over.

This is why the calculator lets you set both numbers. Put in the weeks you will actually be paid for and the hours you will actually work, and the annual figure stops being a rule of thumb and starts being your number.

Converting a salary to an hourly rate to compare with contract work

Going the other way is where the comparison usually goes wrong, because a salary and a contract rate are not the same kind of number. A salaried job at $85,000 divided by 2,080 gives about $41/hour, but that figure quietly includes employer-funded things a contract rate does not: pension or retirement contributions, health cover, paid leave, sick pay, equipment, and the employer's share of payroll taxes.

A contractor charging $41/hour to replace an $85,000 salary is taking a substantial pay cut, because they now fund all of that themselves out of the same number. The commonly used rule of thumb is that a contract rate needs to be somewhere around 25–50% above the equivalent salaried rate to leave you level, with the exact figure depending on how expensive healthcare and unpaid leave are where you live.

Use the conversion as the starting point, not the answer. Work out the salaried hourly equivalent here, then add what your employer currently pays on your behalf before you decide whether a contract rate is genuinely better.

The overtime and unpaid-hours trap

The most common way an hourly conversion misleads is by using contracted hours rather than worked hours. If your contract says 40 and the job reliably takes 50, your real hourly rate is 20% lower than the one on paper, and a role that looked like a raise can be a pay cut per hour of your life.

This is worth doing honestly when you compare two offers, especially across sectors where the expected week differs. Enter the hours you actually expect to work rather than the hours the contract states, and compare the resulting figures. It is often the single number that settles a decision people have been going back and forth on.

For genuinely hourly roles the reverse matters: if overtime is paid at a premium and reliably available, your effective annual figure is higher than the base conversion. Run it both ways — at contracted hours and at realistic hours — and you will see the range rather than a single misleading point.

Frequently asked questions

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