Turn an hourly wage into the number that actually matters when you compare offers: what you take home in a year, and what that pay looks like per week, per two weeks, and per month.
Almost every quick conversion online multiplies your hourly rate by 2,080, the number you get from 40 hours a week times 52 weeks a year. That shortcut is fine as a headline figure and misleading as a budget. It assumes you never take a week off, never get sick, never work a short week because demand dried up, and never pocket a single hour of overtime.
Real pay is lumpier. Hourly workers lose income directly when hours disappear, because the paycheck is a count of time, not a promise. Salaried workers keep the same check whether the week was 38 hours or 55. Those two structures produce the same annual number on paper and very different lives in practice, which is why comparing an hourly offer against a salary offer needs more than one division.
The first line gives you the posted-equivalent salary. The second gives you the rate you are actually earning per hour of your life. When those two numbers diverge, the second one is the honest one.
These figures use the plain 40-hour, 52-week assumption with no overtime and no unpaid leave, so they are a ceiling, not a forecast.
| Hourly rate | Weekly | Monthly | Annual (2,080 hrs) |
|---|---|---|---|
| $15.00 | $600 | $2,600 | $31,200 |
| $20.00 | $800 | $3,467 | $41,600 |
| $25.00 | $1,000 | $4,333 | $52,000 |
| $30.00 | $1,200 | $5,200 | $62,400 |
| $50.00 | $2,000 | $8,667 | $104,000 |
One structural quirk worth knowing: a biweekly paycheck divides the year by 26, a semi-monthly paycheck divides it by 24. On a $52,000 salary that is $2,000 per biweekly check against $2,166.67 per semi-monthly check. Same money, different rhythm, and the semi-monthly version is harder to budget against monthly rent because the deposit dates drift.
Paid vacation looks like free money on a salary, and in cash terms it is. You are paid for 52 weeks and work fewer. The interesting consequence is what it does to your effective rate. A $60,000 salary on a 40-hour week works out to $28.85 an hour across 2,080 hours. With 15 days of paid time off, you work 1,960 hours instead, and the same salary becomes $30.61 an hour of actual work. Every additional week of PTO is a raise that never appears on a pay stub.
For hourly workers the logic flips. Paid vacation is paid at your regular rate, so the annual total stays at 52 weeks. Unpaid vacation is not, so the total shrinks. When you are comparing an hourly contract against a salaried role, the question to ask is blunt: is the time off paid, and how much of it is there?
Here is the same $60,000 salary recalculated against the hours people actually put in. Pay is fixed; the denominator is not.
| Hours actually worked per week | Annual hours | Effective hourly rate |
|---|---|---|
| 40 | 2,080 | $28.85 |
| 45 | 2,340 | $25.64 |
| 50 | 2,600 | $23.08 |
| 55 | 2,860 | $20.98 |
| 60 | 3,120 | $19.23 |
Ten extra hours a week turns a mid-range salaried job into work paid at roughly $19 an hour. If a competing hourly offer pays $24 with real overtime eligibility, the salaried role is the worse deal even though its annual number looks bigger on the offer letter.
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, an employee generally must clear three separate tests to be exempt from overtime: the salary basis test, the salary level test, and the duties test. The federal salary floor for the executive, administrative, and professional exemptions sits at $684 a week, or $35,568 a year, a level restored by a Department of Labor technical amendment that took effect in May 2026 after courts vacated the 2024 increase. Some states set a higher floor, and the duties test is where most classification disputes begin. Being called a manager on a fixed salary does not by itself remove overtime rights.
Neither structure wins on its own. The one that fits depends on how variable your hours are, how much you value a predictable deposit, and whether the benefits gap is large enough to erase a rate difference.
Multiply the hourly rate by the hours you work each week, then multiply by the number of weeks you are paid for. At 40 hours and 52 weeks, that is the same as multiplying the rate by 2,080. For a part-time schedule, swap 40 for your real weekly hours.
$41,600 at 40 hours a week for 52 weeks, which is $3,467 a month before tax. Two unpaid weeks off would bring it to $40,000, and five overtime hours a week at time and a half would push it to $49,400.
No. Every figure here is gross pay, before federal income tax, FICA, state tax, and any benefit deductions. Those can remove 20 to 35 percent depending on where you live and how you file, so budget from a net estimate, not the gross.
Yes. Paid time off is compensated at your normal rate, so the annual total does not change. Use fewer than 52 weeks only for time off that is unpaid, or for seasonal work with a defined off-season.
Overtime hours are multiplied by your regular rate times 1.5, then by the weeks worked. The calculator keeps them separate from regular pay so you can see how much of your income depends on hours past 40, which is the part most likely to disappear in a slow quarter.
Because the 2,080 figure counts hours you are paid for, not hours you work. Subtract your paid time off and paid holidays from that total and divide the salary by the remainder. The result is what each hour of your working life actually earns.