Hourly to Salary Calculator

Comparing a job offer that pays an hourly wage against one that pays an annual salary is harder than it sounds, because the conversion depends on assumptions that are easy to overlook: how many hours you actually work per week, and how many weeks per year you actually get paid for. This calculator makes both directions of that conversion explicit. Going from hourly to salary, the calculation builds up in stages. Daily pay is your hourly rate multiplied by the hours you work in a typical day (approximated here as hours per week divided by five, assuming a standard five-day week). Weekly pay is simply hours per week multiplied by the hourly rate. Monthly pay takes the weekly figure and scales it to an average month — the standard convention is weekly pay times 52 weeks, divided by 12 months, rather than just multiplying by 4, because most months contain slightly more than four weeks. Annual pay is the weekly figure multiplied by however many weeks per year you're actually being paid for — a full-time employee working all 52 weeks would use 52, but someone with unpaid time off, a fixed-term contract, or a role that only runs during a school year would use a lower figure. Going the other direction, from an annual salary to an hourly equivalent, the formula divides the annual figure by the total hours actually worked in a year: hourly rate = annual salary ÷ (hours per week × weeks per year). This is the calculation job seekers most often want when comparing a salaried offer to an hourly contracting rate, or when deciding whether unpaid overtime at a salaried job effectively lowers their real hourly pay below what a straightforward hourly role would offer. A worked example: someone earning £25/hour, working 40 hours a week for all 52 weeks of the year, has a weekly pay of £1,000, a monthly pay of £1,000 × 52 ÷ 12 ≈ £4,333, and an annual pay of £1,000 × 52 = £52,000. Now compare a salaried role advertised at £52,000/year with an expectation of 45 hours per week (5 extra "unpaid" hours baked into the role): the effective hourly rate is £52,000 ÷ (45 × 52) ≈ £22.22/hour — noticeably lower than the £25/hour hourly role, even though the headline annual figures match exactly. This is the calculation that reveals when a "generous" salary is actually a pay cut once real hours worked are accounted for. A common misconception is assuming that a salary divided by 2,080 (the "standard" 40 hours × 52 weeks) always gives the correct hourly equivalent — but this only holds if you genuinely work exactly 40 hours a week for all 52 weeks with no unpaid overtime, no unpaid holiday, and no reduced weeks. Many professionals working 45-50+ hour weeks under a fixed salary have a real hourly rate substantially below what the naive 2,080-hour assumption implies, which is why this calculator lets you adjust both the hours-per-week and weeks-per-year inputs rather than hardcoding them — the accuracy of the comparison depends entirely on using your actual working pattern, not a generic assumption.