Hourly to Salary Calculator

Convert a rate to a salary, a salary to a rate, or work backwards from the income you want to the contract rate that produces it.

Your pay
40 is the US convention, and 40 × 52 is where 2,080 comes from.
A calendar year is 52.1775 weeks. 52 is the payroll convention because it divides into 26 fortnights.
Weeks you take and are not paid for. They come straight off the annual figure.
After tax and after business costs — the money that reaches you.
Not hours worked. Selling, invoicing, admin and learning are all unbillable and all compulsory.
Holiday, sickness, and the weeks between contracts. Six is optimistic if you have never contracted before.
Health insurance, equipment, software, accounting, liability cover. Health insurance is the line most people forget, and usually the largest.
Income tax plus self-employment tax at 15.3%. Around 30% is a starting point; your bracket and your state move it.

How this is worked out

Hourly to salary is one multiplication, and every argument about it is an argument about the inputs:

annual = hourly × hours per week × paid weeks

$25 an hour at 40 hours for 52 weeks is $52,000. That is where the familiar 2,080 hours comes from — 40 × 52 — and it is a convention rather than a measurement. A calendar year is 365.25 days, which is 52.1775 weeks, so 40 hours a week is really 2,087 hours. Payroll uses 2,080 because it divides cleanly into 26 fortnights and 12 months.

Unpaid leave breaks the convention in the other direction. Two unpaid weeks means 50 paid weeks and 2,000 paid hours, so the same $25 an hour is $50,000, not $52,000. The rate did not change; the hours you are paid for did. Both figures are inputs on this page rather than hidden assumptions.

The freelance mode runs the arithmetic backwards, because that is the direction the question actually arrives in — you know what you need to earn, not what to charge:

invoice = (income ÷ (1 − tax rate)) + overhead

rate = invoice ÷ (billable hours a week × billable weeks)

The two divisors are what make a contract rate so much higher than an employed one. You are only paid for billable hours, and only for the weeks you actually work.

A worked example

Hourly rate
$25.00
Hours a week × paid weeks
40 × 52 = 2,080 hours
Annual salary
$52,000.00
Each month
$4,333.33
Every two weeks
$2,000.00
At 52.1775 weeks instead
2,087 hours — $52,177.50
— freelance mode, same page —
Income you want to keep
$75,000.00
Tax at 30%
$32,142.86
Business costs
$12,000.00
You must invoice
$119,142.86
Billable hours (25 × 46 weeks)
1,150
Rate to charge
$103.60 an hour — $828.82 a day
The employed equivalent
$36.06 an hour ($75,000 ÷ 2,080)
Charging $36.06 instead leaves
$17,026.44 — a 77% pay cut

Where 2,080 hours comes from, and why it is slightly wrong

Forty hours a week for fifty-two weeks is 2,080 hours, and almost every US salary conversion uses it. It is a convention: a year is 365.25 days once leap years are averaged in, which is 52.1775 weeks, so a genuine full-time year is closer to 2,087 hours. The Office of Personnel Management uses 2,087 for exactly this reason when converting federal salaries to hourly rates.

The gap is about $178 a year at $25 an hour, which is small enough to ignore and large enough to make two calculators disagree. What matters is knowing which convention a number came from. A job posting quoting "$52,000, equivalent to $25 an hour" has used 2,080; a payroll system reconciling to the penny may not have.

Both figures are on this page. The panel under the readout shows your inputs at 52 weeks and at 52.1775, so you can see the difference rather than wonder which one you are looking at.

No paid leave is a real difference, not a footnote

The United States has no statutory paid holiday and no statutory paid sick leave at the federal level. Not one day. Whatever you get is your employer's policy, and roughly a fifth of private-sector workers have no paid vacation at all. That makes the hourly-to-salary conversion mean something different here than it does anywhere else in the English-speaking world.

If your leave is paid, the conversion is clean: you are paid for 52 weeks whether you are at a desk or not, so $25 an hour is $52,000. If it is unpaid, every week off comes straight out of the annual figure. Two weeks of unpaid vacation and five unpaid sick days is closer to 49 paid weeks — $49,000 rather than $52,000, for a rate that has not changed.

That is why the unpaid weeks field exists and defaults to zero rather than being buried. Comparing a salaried offer with an hourly one without settling this question compares two numbers that are not measuring the same year.

The contractor rate: both halves of FICA, and health insurance

An employee pays 7.65% in FICA — Social Security and Medicare — and the employer pays a matching 7.65% that never appears on the pay stub. A contractor pays both halves as self-employment tax: 15.3%, charged on 92.35% of net earnings, so an effective 14.13% of profit. Half of it is deductible against income tax, which softens it but does not remove it.

Health insurance is the bigger number and the one most first-time contractors forget entirely. Employer-sponsored coverage is a substantial untaxed benefit; on your own you buy it with after-tax dollars from the individual market, and it belongs in the business costs field on this page rather than being discovered in January.

Then there is everything else that stops: the 401(k) match, disability cover, paid holidays, the equipment on your desk, and the weeks between contracts when nobody is paying you at all. The freelance mode prices those by asking for billable hours and weeks off rather than assuming a 40-hour, 52-week year that no contractor has.

Salaried does not mean exempt from overtime

Being paid a salary does not by itself remove your right to overtime. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act an employee is exempt only if they are paid on a salary basis above a threshold and their actual duties fall into an executive, administrative, professional, outside sales or computer category. Job titles decide nothing; duties and pay do.

This matters when converting a rate to a salary, because a non-exempt salaried employee is still owed time and a half over 40 hours in a workweek. The regular rate for that calculation is the weekly salary divided by the hours it is intended to cover, which is precisely the conversion on this page.

If you are salaried, working sixty-hour weeks and have been told overtime does not apply because you are "on salary", it is worth checking the duties test rather than the payslip. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour has not moved since July 2009, but the overtime rules have.

Assumptions and sources

Hours convention
2,080 hours = 40 × 52. The exact calendar year is 52.1775 weeks (365.25 ÷ 7), giving 2,087 hours — the figure the US Office of Personnel Management uses for federal pay conversions. https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/pay-administration/fact-sheets/computing-hourly-rates-of-pay-using-the-2087-hour-divisor/
Self-employment tax
15.3% on 92.35% of net earnings — 12.4% Social Security plus 2.9% Medicare, both halves. IRS Schedule SE. https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/self-employment-tax-social-security-and-medicare-taxes
Federal minimum wage
$7.25 an hour, unchanged since 24 July 2009. US Department of Labor. checked 2026-08
Overtime and exempt status
Fair Work standards under the FLSA — salary basis plus a duties test. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/overtime
Arithmetic
hourlyToSalary, salaryToHourly and freelanceRate in assets/js/tools/work.js, verified in tools/test/work.mjs.
Not included
Federal, state or local income tax, FICA withholding on employment income, benefits, bonuses and equity. The freelance tax rate is a figure you supply, not a calculation of your liability.
Rates current as of 2026 — verify before relying on this. Tax rates, brackets and state minimum wages vary and change. The federal figures here are current at the checked date; treat the tax rate in the freelance mode as your own estimate rather than a calculation of your liability.
Questions

What people ask about hourly and salary pay

How do I convert an hourly rate to a salary?

Multiply the hourly rate by hours a week and by paid weeks. $25 an hour at 40 hours for 52 weeks is $52,000. If your time off is unpaid, reduce the weeks — 50 paid weeks gives $50,000 at the same rate.

Why do some calculators use 2,080 hours and others 2,087?

2,080 is 40 × 52, the payroll convention, because it divides evenly into 26 fortnights. 2,087 is the true annual average — a year is 52.1775 weeks once leap years are averaged in — and it is what the Office of Personnel Management uses for federal pay. At $25 an hour the difference is about $178 a year — $52,177.50 against $52,000.

What hourly rate does a $60,000 salary work out at?

$28.85 an hour on the 2,080-hour convention. At 45 hours a week it is $25.64, and at 50 hours $23.08 — which is the honest way to compare a salaried offer against an hourly one when the hours are not the same.

What should I charge as a freelancer?

Work backwards, not forwards. Take the income you want to keep, gross it up for tax, add your business costs, then divide by the hours you can genuinely bill in the weeks you actually work. On this page's defaults that turns a $75,000 target into a $103.60 hourly rate — not the $36.06 the same salary implies for an employee.

Why is a contractor rate so much higher than an employee rate?

Three reasons compound. Only some of your hours are billable; only some weeks are worked; and you pay 15.3% self-employment tax plus your own health insurance, equipment and retirement contributions. Charging your old employed rate as a contractor is typically a pay cut of well over half.

Does a salary mean I cannot be paid overtime?

No. Under the FLSA you are exempt only if you are paid on a salary basis above the threshold and your duties fall into one of the exempt categories. A salaried non-exempt employee is still owed time and a half over 40 hours a week, calculated from the regular rate — the same conversion this page performs.

Related

Next steps

Paycheck Calculator Gross to net, with the deductions your country actually applies. Time Card Calculator Weekly hours with the overtime rules of your country. Invoice Generator With the right tax fields for your market. Retirement Calculator 401(k), ISA, RRSP, Super or EPF — the right wrapper for your country.