Salary Calculator

What Is a Salary?

Salary and wage are two different promises. One promises an amount of money per year whatever the weeks look like; the other promises an amount per hour and lets the hours decide the total. Almost everything on this page follows from that one distinction.

Salary and hourly wage, plainly

A salary is a fixed annual sum, divided into equal paychecks and paid whether a given week ran long or short. An hourly wage is a price per hour worked: fewer hours, less money; more hours, more money. Both describe gross pay, the figure before anything is withheld, and both can be expressed in the other's units — that translation is all this calculator does.

The distinction that actually moves money is not salary versus hourly but exempt versus non-exempt under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Non-exempt employees, salaried or not, must be paid at least one and a half times their regular hourly rate for hours past 40 in a workweek. Exempt employees are not, which is why an exempt salary quietly loses value as hours grow: the annual number stays where it is while the divisor rises underneath it.

Federal regulation makes the conversion explicit for non-exempt staff. Under 29 CFR §778.113 the regular hourly rate is computed by dividing the salary by the number of hours the salary is intended to compensate — exactly the arithmetic this page performs with the hours you enter.

What each number means

Every figure produced here is gross and in US dollars. Annual is the headline salary. Monthly is that figure divided by twelve, and unless you are paid once a month it is a budgeting number rather than a paycheck. Weekly is one week's gross at your hours, biweekly is two of those, and daily assumes the week's hours are spread over five days.

The hourly line is carried to the cent deliberately. A single cent is $20.80 a year at 2,080 hours, which is enough to matter when two offers are a rounding apart, and it is the figure a payroll system will use rather than the tidy one on the job posting.

The three fields this calculator asks for

Three inputs, and only the third is easy to get wrong:

• Convert — the direction. Hourly → Salary multiplies; Salary → Hourly divides. Everything else on the panel is derived from whichever annual figure results.
• Amount — an hourly rate in the first direction, an annual salary in the second. Zero or a negative number returns "Enter an amount" instead of a result.
• Hours per Week — your real average week, not the number printed on the job description. It must fall between 1 and 100; outside that range the calculator asks again rather than guessing.

Weekly hours is the only assumption in the entire model, and you set it. A 36-hour nursing rota, a 37.5-hour office week with an unpaid lunch and a 45-hour salaried norm produce three very different answers from the same headline pay.

How Do You Calculate Salary From an Hourly Rate?

Multiply by the hours, then by 52. Every other line on the results panel is that annual figure divided by the number of pay periods in a year.

The salary formula

Hourly → Salary
  Annual = hourly rate × hours per week × 52

Salary → Hourly
  Hourly = annual salary ÷ (52 × hours per week)

Every pay period comes from the annual figure
  Monthly  = annual ÷ 12
  Biweekly = annual ÷ 26
  Weekly   = annual ÷ 52
  Daily    = hourly rate × (hours per week ÷ 5)

• 52 — the weeks in a year. It assumes every one of them is paid, which is normally true of a salaried role with paid leave and often false of hourly work.
• Hours per week — the pivot. It is the only input that can turn the same headline pay into two answers thousands of dollars apart.
• ÷ 26 — biweekly periods, a paycheck every other Friday. This is not the same as twice a month, and the difference is worked through further down.
• Daily — the weekly hours spread over five days, so a 40-hour week becomes eight-hour days. It appears in the Hourly → Salary direction only.
• Nothing else — no overtime premium, no tax, no bonus. This is a units conversion, and its honesty depends entirely on the hours you feed it.

Step by step

Converting $25 an hour on a 40-hour week:

• Step 1 — Take one week of gross pay: $25 × 40 = $1,000.
• Step 2 — Multiply by 52 weeks: $1,000 × 52 = $52,000 a year.
• Step 3 — Monthly: $52,000 ÷ 12 = $4,333.
• Step 4 — Biweekly: $52,000 ÷ 26 = $2,000.
• Step 5 — Daily: $25 × (40 ÷ 5) = $200.

Run it backwards to go the other way: $52,000 ÷ 52 = $1,000 a week, and $1,000 ÷ 40 = $25.00 an hour. The two directions are one equation read from opposite ends, which is why a round trip lands exactly where it started.

Worked example: $25 an hour

Those inputs produce the following, straight from this page's formula:

$25/hour · 40 h/week · Hourly → Salary

$52,000/year · $4,333/month · $2,000/biweekly · $1,000/week · $200/day

The monthly line is the one to read carefully. $4,333 is the annual salary divided by twelve, and unless your employer pays monthly you will never see that number on a payslip. Paid every other week you receive $2,000, twenty-six times — the same $52,000, arriving on a rhythm that drifts against the calendar rather than landing with the rent.

Push the same rate to a 45-hour week and the calculator returns $58,500. That is the flat conversion, and for a non-exempt employee it is too low: five hours at time and a half add $187.50 to the week, making the week $1,187.50 and the year $61,750 — $3,250 above the flat figure. The calculator pays every hour at the same rate, so any week that runs past 40 needs the overtime premium added separately.

Reversing it: salary to hourly

The same equation, divided rather than multiplied. At 40 hours a week:

Two salaries can be worth the identical hourly rate at different hours, and that is where offers get compared properly: $75,000 at 45 hours a week and $60,000 at 36 hours both work out to $32.05 an hour. The bigger number is $15,000 a year better only if the extra nine hours a week are worth having.

The doubling shortcut, and by how much it lies

Double the hourly rate and read the answer as thousands — $25 an hour is roughly $50,000 — is the mental version almost everyone uses. It is exact for a 50-week year at 40 hours, and against the calculator's 52 weeks it is short by precisely two weeks of pay, which is 3.8% every time.

$15 an hour: $30,000 by shortcut against $31,200 in fact, $1,200 low. $25: $50,000 against $52,000, $2,000 low. $40: $80,000 against $83,200, $3,200 low. $60: $120,000 against $124,800, $4,800 low. The percentage never moves because the shortcut always returns 50/52 of the real figure — fine for a sanity check in a conversation, not for deciding between two offers.

Salary Chart: Hourly Rate to Annual Pay

Full-time at 40 hours a week across 52 weeks, unless a table says otherwise. Every cell below came out of this page's formula, so any row can be reproduced by typing its inputs into the calculator.

A raise only counts if it outruns prices — test this year's against the Inflation Calculator.

Hourly rate to annual, monthly, biweekly and weekly

The first row is the federal minimum wage. 29 U.S.C. §206(a)(1) has set it at $7.25 an hour since 2009, which annualizes to $15,080 of gross pay at full-time hours — $290 a week. Many states and cities require more, and where they do the higher floor applies.

The same $25 an hour, at different weekly hours

Rate held still, hours varied. This is the column that decides what a headline rate is worth:

A 20-hour week at $25 pays $26,000; the same rate at 50 hours pays $65,000. The rate never changed, which is why quoting an hourly figure without the schedule attached tells you very little.

What a fixed salary is worth per hour

Read from the other end. A $75,000 salary, as the working week grows:

Ten hours a week costs this salary $7.21 an hour, from $36.06 down to $28.85 — a 20% pay cut that appears in no document and requires no one's signature.

Pay Periods: Monthly, Biweekly, Semi-Monthly and Weekly

The annual figure is fixed; how it is sliced is not. Four schedules are common in the United States, and two of them get confused constantly because they produce similar-looking checks on dissimilar dates.

The four divisors

A $60,000 salary, paid four different ways:

The calculator returns the weekly, biweekly and monthly lines and rounds them to whole dollars on screen — $1,154, $2,308 and $5,000 on this salary. The cents are shown here because payroll pays them. Semi-monthly is not one of the outputs: divide the annual figure by 24 yourself, and on $60,000 that gives $2,500.00 against a biweekly $2,307.69, a difference of $192.31 per check for identical annual pay.

The three-paycheck month

Biweekly pay has 26 periods while the calendar has 12 months, so two months each year contain three paychecks instead of two. The third check is not a bonus, it is the arithmetic catching up: twenty-six biweekly checks and twelve monthly ones describe the same $60,000.

The consequence is budgetary, and it catches people every year. A budget built on "two paychecks a month" runs on 2 × $2,307.69 = $4,615.38, which is $384.62 short of the $5,000 a month the salary really provides — short in ten months, flush in two. Setting the monthly budget from the annual figure ÷ 12 keeps the arithmetic honest and turns the two extra checks into what they should be: a scheduled surplus rather than a surprise.

Semi-monthly pay avoids the drift entirely, because the dates are anchored to the month rather than to a fourteen-day cycle. The trade is that the pay date wanders across weekdays, and hourly staff paid semi-monthly end up with pay periods that split workweeks — which is why hourly payrolls tend to be weekly or biweekly and salaried payrolls tend to be semi-monthly.

How to Read Your Result

The panel returns four lines, ordered so the answer arrives first and the assumptions behind it come last.

The four lines

• Line 1 — the answer: $52,000/year converting up, or $36.06/hour converting down. This is the figure to quote in a negotiation.
• Line 2 — the arithmetic written out with your own inputs ($25/hour × 40 h/week × 52 weeks), so the result can be checked on paper without trusting the tool.
• Line 3 — the other pay periods. Converting up you also get a daily figure; converting down you do not, because a salary says nothing about how its days are arranged.
• Line 4 — the standing caveat: gross pay, on a year in which all 52 weeks are paid.

Why hours move the hourly rate but not the monthly one

In the Salary → Hourly direction, changing the weekly hours changes the top line and nothing beneath it. $75,000 is $6,250 a month at 40 hours a week and $6,250 a month at 55 — the employer pays the salary either way. Only the rate moves, from $36.06 to $26.22.

That is the entire argument about exempt salaried work, in two numbers. The paycheck is fixed, so every additional hour is unpaid, and the hourly line is the only place it becomes visible. Enter the week you actually work rather than the one in the contract, and the result is the price you are really working for.

Comparing two offers

Put both offers in the same unit before comparing them. Seven jobs, some of which are worth exactly the same:

The annual figure is also the gross income mortgage lenders run their ratios against, so it feeds straight into the Home Affordability Calculator.

$75,000 at 45 hours and $60,000 at 36 hours are the same job per hour. So are $100,000 at 50 hours and $80,000 at 40. Once both offers sit in the same unit the question stops being which number is larger and becomes which trade you would rather make — and the $60,000 at 50 hours, at $23.08, is the one to walk away from.

Gross Pay vs Take-Home Pay

Every figure above is gross. What reaches your account depends on your filing status, your state, your dependents and the benefits you elect — and exactly one component of the gap can be computed without knowing any of that.

FICA: the one deduction you can compute exactly

Social Security takes 6.2% of wages and Medicare 1.45% from the employee's side of the paycheck, 7.65% combined, per IRS Topic 751. Medicare's share has no ceiling; Social Security's stops at a wage base the Social Security Administration resets each year, which sits above every salary in the table below. Wages over $200,000 carry an extra 0.9% Medicare surcharge.

On the $52,000 example that is $3,978 a year, or $331.50 a month against a $4,333 monthly gross. FICA is flat and unavoidable at these levels; every other deduction is where the variation lives.

What else comes out

Federal income tax is withheld from each paycheck according to the Form W-4 you filed and rises through graduated brackets, making it the largest single deduction on most salaries. State income tax adds a second layer across most of the country — Texas, Florida and Washington levy none on wages, while California and New York take a meaningful percentage — and a handful of cities take a third.

Then come the deductions you chose: health, dental and vision premiums, a flexible spending account, disability cover, union dues, and retirement contributions. Traditional 401(k) money is withheld before federal income tax is figured, so it reduces the tax bill as well as the paycheck; Roth contributions are taken after tax and do not. That is why two colleagues on identical $75,000 salaries can bank visibly different amounts.

A pre-tax contribution costs your net pay less than it adds to the balance, and the employer match is on top of that — the trade-off is worked through on the 401(k) Calculator.

Getting a real take-home number

There is no honest shortcut, because the answer is personal. The IRS Tax Withholding Estimator runs your W-4, filing status and dependents through the same logic your employer's payroll system uses, and it is the right tool for the final figure.

For a plan before that: take 7.65% off for FICA, then apply whatever percentage of gross your most recent pay stub showed for federal and state withholding, then subtract your premiums. On the $52,000 example, FICA alone leaves $48,022 and income tax and benefits come out of that. Budget on the smaller number — a rent commitment signed against an offer-letter figure is a commitment against money that was never going to arrive.

Limits: When This Calculation Does Not Apply

This is a units conversion on a 52-week year, and it is deliberately narrow. Here is where it stops:

• Unpaid weeks. The 52 assumes every week is paid. At $25 an hour a 50-week year is $50,000 and a 48-week year is $48,000. To model it here, scale the hours instead: entering 38.46 rather than 40 returns $49,998, within two dollars of a true 50-week year.
• Overtime. Hours past 40 in a workweek earn at least time and a half for non-exempt employees, while this calculator pays every hour at the flat rate. At $25 an hour and 45 hours, that understates the year by $3,250 — $58,500 against $61,750.
• Variable pay. Commission, tips, shift differentials, bonuses and equity sit outside the model, and so does a mid-year raise: run the calculation twice and weight each result by the number of weeks it covered.
• Salaried non-exempt staff on a fluctuating workweek. Under 29 CFR §778.114 the regular rate is recomputed every week by dividing the salary by the hours actually worked that week, so no single annual rate describes the job.
• Hours worked versus hours paid. 2,080 hours (40 × 52) is the paid year. With ten holidays and two weeks of leave actually taken you work about 1,920, which makes a $52,000 salary worth $27.08 per hour worked rather than $25.00.
• Federal employees. 5 U.S.C. §5504(b) converts an annual rate at 2,087 hours rather than 2,080, smoothing the leap-year effect across 26 biweekly periods; on $52,000 that gives $24.92 an hour instead of $25.00.
• Anything after tax. Nothing here models withholding, so never compare a figure from this page against a take-home number from a payroll estimator — they are measuring different things.
• Pay conventions outside the United States. Where a mandatory thirteenth-month payment or a statutory holiday allowance forms part of annual pay, add it separately; the model is a plain 52-week year.

Hours past forty are priced differently from the first forty — work them out properly with the Overtime Pay Calculator.

None of these are reasons to distrust the conversion. They are reasons to be precise about what is being converted: enter the week you really work, and read the annual figure as gross pay for a year in which every week is paid.