Salary to hourly converter

Comparing a salaried offer against contract work honestly

The converter's real job is comparing pay structures that are quoted in different units, and the two adjustment fields are where the honesty happens. A salaried employee comparing against a contract rate should not just divide by 2,080 hours: the contractor buys their own health insurance, funds both halves of payroll tax, and takes unpaid vacation. The standard freelancer heuristic is that an independent rate needs to run well above the W-2 hourly equivalent to break even, so when a recruiter says "$60 an hour, 1099," convert it back to a salary with the weeks-per-year field set to your realistic working weeks, then mentally subtract benefits before comparing.

The direction of the tool follows your typing: edit the salary and the hourly side updates, edit the hourly and the salary recalculates. That makes it quick to answer the sneaky version of the question, which is what a salary really pays per hour at the schedule the job actually demands. Type your salary, then raise hours per week from 40 to the true number, and watch the hourly figure fall. A $70,000 role at 55 real hours pays a much less impressive rate than its title suggests, and seeing that number has ended more than one negotiation stalemate.

The per-8-hour-day stat has a niche but pleasing use: pricing a day off. It tells you what one unpaid day costs, or what a single vacation day is worth when an employer offers to buy back unused leave.

A contractor's year, worked out

Take a freelancer targeting $85,000 a year who works 45-hour weeks but realistically bills 48 weeks after holidays, gaps between projects, and a vacation. Hours per year: 45 x 48 = 2,160. The required rate is 85,000 / 2,160 = $39.35 an hour. The side stats fill in the rest: $1,770.83 per week, $7,083.33 per month, and $314.81 per standard 8-hour day. Had they lazily assumed 40 hours and 52 weeks, the target rate would look like $40.87, close enough to feel the same and wrong in the direction that costs money once the unbilled weeks arrive.

The arithmetic underneath

Everything reduces to one quantity: hours per year, which is hours per week times weeks per year. Salary divided by that gives the hourly rate; hourly times that gives the salary. Weekly pay is the hourly rate times your weekly hours, monthly is the annual figure divided by 12, and the daily stat always uses an 8-hour day regardless of your schedule, so part-timers should read it as a standardized unit rather than their actual day. Whichever field you edited last drives the calculation, the opposite field is filled in automatically, and the formula line spells out the division so nothing is hidden.

What gross-pay math leaves out

Every figure here is gross. Taxes, retirement contributions, and insurance premiums all come out before money reaches you, and they differ enough by state and situation that no honest converter should guess at them. Overtime is also invisible: US hourly workers earn time and a half past 40 hours, so an hourly job with regular overtime out-earns this page's straight multiplication. And benefits are the silent second salary. Employer health coverage, retirement matching, and paid leave are worth a meaningful fraction of many salaries, none of which appears in an hourly rate on either side of the comparison.