Salary Converter

Enter an hourly rate and the calculator turns it into weekly, monthly and annual pay, or switch direction and break an annual salary back down to the hour. Hours per week and paid weeks per year are both adjustable, so part-time schedules and jobs with unpaid time off convert just as cleanly as a standard full-time role. Read the four output rows as the same earnings expressed in different units of time, all of them gross, before any tax or deduction.

The arithmetic in both directions

One multiplication chain covers everything:

annual = hourly × hours_week × weeks_year

With the defaults — 28.50 an hour, 40 hours, 52 weeks — weekly pay is 28.50 × 40 = 1,140.00, the annual salary is 1,140 × 52 = 59,280, and the monthly figure is 59,280 ÷ 12 = 4,940. Starting from a salary runs the same chain backwards: 59,280 ÷ (40 × 52) = 28.50 an hour. Weekly pay is always the hourly rate times weekly hours, and monthly pay is always one twelfth of the annual figure, whichever direction you start from. Nothing in the chain is compounded or rounded on the way through, so the two directions are exact inverses of each other and a salary converted to an hourly rate and back returns the number you began with.

Where 2,080 hours comes from

Forty hours across 52 weeks gives the 2,080-hour year that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and most HR departments use to annualize wages. Federal payroll is slightly different: the Office of Personnel Management divides annual pay by 2,087 hours rather than 2,080, a divisor written into 5 U.S.C. 5504 to average out the fact that the calendar runs a little longer than 52 whole weeks once leap years are counted. The gap between the two conventions is about a third of a percent, roughly 200 a year on a 28.50 rate. The 2,080 convention also powers a useful mental shortcut: doubling the hourly rate approximates the salary in thousands, so 28.50 an hour is roughly 57,000 before the exact math lands on 59,280.

From salt to salary

The word salary descends from the Latin salarium, built on sal, salt. A popular story holds that Roman soldiers were paid in salt, or handed an allowance to buy it, and that this is the source of the phrase worth one's salt. The Latin root is real, but the story is not: no ancient source records legionaries being handed salt instead of coin, and the softer version, a cash allowance earmarked for buying salt, is just as unattested in antiquity. Historians treat the salt-wage as folklore that has attached itself to a genuine word. What the salarium did establish was the idea of a fixed, recurring payment for service, held apart from a price paid for goods.

That distinction still separates a salary from a wage. A wage is tied to a unit — an hour worked, a day, a piece produced — so the pay rises and falls with the count. A salary is a fixed amount for a period, usually a year, paid out in equal instalments regardless of the exact hours. Before industrialization salaried work was uncommon, mostly limited to household servants and to clerical or government posts, and much labour was compensated in lodging, food and clothing rather than money. Most of the jobs created in the early factory system were paid by the hour, the day or the piece. Salaried employment spread during the second industrial revolution, usually dated from about 1870 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, when large firms needed managers and office staff whose output could not be metered hour by hour, and white-collar payrolls kept expanding through the 1920s. This tool moves between those two worlds, treating a salary and a wage as two views of the same earnings.

Standardizing the working week

Converting an hourly rate to a yearly one only means something once the length of the working week is fixed, and that number is the product of two centuries of argument. In 1817 the reformer Robert Owen coined the demand that still frames the question: eight hours' labour, eight hours' recreation, eight hours' rest. Across the nineteenth century the eight-hour day became the central goal of organized labour. On 1 May 1886 hundreds of thousands of American workers struck for it, a mobilization remembered through the Haymarket affair in Chicago and marked since as May Day. Employers moved unevenly. On 5 January 1914 the Ford Motor Company cut its shifts from nine hours to eight and raised the minimum daily wage from 2.34 dollars to five, finding that lower turnover and higher output more than covered the cost. Ford went further in 1926, moving its plants to a five-day, forty-hour week, and that pattern spread through American industry over the following decade.

Law caught up in 1938. President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act on 25 June that year, and it did several things at once: it set a federal minimum wage, beginning at 25 cents an hour; it restricted child labour; and it capped the standard week, requiring time-and-a-half pay for hours beyond it. The ceiling was phased in rather than imposed at once: 44 hours in the Act's first year, 42 in the second, and 40 from 1940 onward. The same statute drew the line this calculator quietly assumes. A non-exempt worker is owed overtime whether paid hourly or on a salary, while an exempt worker must clear a salary threshold and a duties test and is owed nothing extra for a long week. The forty-hour default here, and the overtime premium the tool deliberately leaves out, both trace back to that law.

Unpaid weeks and shorter weeks

The weeks input is where unpaid leave belongs. A contractor who bills 40 hours a week but takes four unpaid weeks off has 48 paid weeks, and 28.50 × 40 × 48 = 54,720, exactly 4,560 less than the headline figure. Standard full-time hours also differ by country, which changes what the same salary is worth per hour.

A 59,280 salary is 28.50 an hour on a 40-hour American week but 32.57 an hour on a 35-hour French one. Set the hours input to your real contract, not the local default.

Gross pay, not take-home

Every figure here is gross — before income tax, US payroll taxes or UK National Insurance, pension or superannuation contributions, and anything else withheld. The monthly number is the accounting twelfth of the year, not necessarily a paycheck: biweekly payroll produces 26 paychecks of annual ÷ 26, so two months a year contain three paydays. Overtime, bonuses and shift premiums sit outside the multiplication as well — the conversion assumes every paid hour earns the same rate.

These figures are gross pay derived from your own inputs and ignore tax, deductions and overtime rules, so treat them as a guide rather than a payroll calculation. See the site disclaimer.

Frequently asked questions

How much per year is 28.50 an hour?

At 40 hours a week for 52 weeks, 28.50 an hour comes to 59,280 a year — that is the standard 2,080-hour full-time convention. On a 37.5-hour week the same rate gives 55,575, and dropping to 48 paid weeks at 40 hours gives 54,720. The hours assumption moves the answer more than most people expect.

How do I convert an annual salary to an hourly rate?

Divide the salary by your paid hours per year, which is hours per week times weeks per year. A 52,000 salary over a 40-hour, 52-week year is 52,000 ÷ 2,080 = 25.00 an hour. The same salary on a 37.5-hour week works out to 26.67.

Why is my paycheck not my salary divided by 12?

Most US employers pay every two weeks, which makes 26 paychecks a year rather than 12 monthly ones. A 59,280 salary paid biweekly is 2,280 per paycheck, and two months each year contain three paydays. The monthly figure this calculator shows is the accounting average of 4,940, not a payslip amount.

Is 2,080 or 2,087 the right number of work hours in a year?

Both are in official use. The everyday HR convention is 2,080, which is simply 40 hours times 52 weeks, while the US Office of Personnel Management annualizes federal pay at 2,087 hours because the calendar averages slightly more than 52 weeks once leap years are counted. On a 28.50 hourly rate the difference is about 200 a year.

Does the conversion include overtime or tax?

No. The output is gross base pay, assuming every hour is paid at the same rate. In the US, non-exempt employees earn at least 1.5 times their regular rate for hours beyond 40 in a week under the FLSA, and taxes and other deductions then reduce what actually lands in your account.