How to figure out yearly salary from hourly wage

Created by Mateusz Mucha, Filip Derma and Tibor Pal, PhD candidate

Reviewed by Bogna Szyk and Jack Bowater

Based on research by

“Managerial Economics and Business Strategy“ (2009)

Last updated: Sep 07, 2022

Salary to hourly wage calculator lets you see how much you earn over different periods. It is a flexible tool that allows you to convert your annual remuneration to an hourly paycheck, recalculate monthly wage to hourly rate, weekly rate to a yearly wage, etc. This salary converter does it all very quickly and easily, saving you time and effort. In the article below, you can find information about salary ranges, a closer look at hourly and annual types of employment, as well as the pros and cons for each of these. Moreover, you can find a step-by-step explanation of how to use this paycheck calculator down below.

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Salary to hourly

Looking for a new job is a tough and stressful task. You need to change your community, coworkers, place, and even habits. But a job change can be essential for your career at a certain time. You will be better off if you face and overcome these difficulties.

Nowadays, thanks to the Internet, we have access to a huge amount of job offers globally. You can easily check your city, another state, nearby countries, or even another continent for new prospects. That might be confusing. However, a few factors might be decisive for your final choice. For many of us, salary is one of the most important aspects while choosing a particular job position. For the rest of us, even it is not the top priority element, it is still one of the most significant motivators that lead us to say: ok, I want to work here. So, let's take a closer look at how to draw conclusions from the numbers. Your future employer may introduce a salary offer in a few different ways:

  • hourly wage
  • daily wage
  • weekly wage
  • monthly wage
  • annual wage

In fact, all of them sum up to the same value, if considered over the same period of time. However, when you take a first look at different job offers, where salary is presented in various ways, the whole issue may confuse you. You might be not able to easily compare the rates. To have a clear view, first, you need to do some math with the numbers. If you have many offers to recalculate, that will take a long time, and if you make a mistake the consequences could be dire. A much nicer and easier way is to use this paycheck calculator and have all the results immediately.

Paycheck calculator

This salary to hourly converter can save a lot of your time and effort. And time is money, right? Imagine if you didn't need to do all these boring calculations or to compare the salaries manually. Nice, isn't it? Thanks to us, it is possible! We provide you the smart salary converter that recalculates all types of wages mentioned in the paragraph above. The only two things you need to do is enter how many hours per week you work and fill in the value for one type of wage, e.g., the monthly wage. Results for all other wage types will be shown automatically. That's cool!

What is more, the appropriate currency for your country is already set by default. If you want to perform a few calculations in a row for different salaries, it won't be a problem - simply lock the hours per week field and it will not change every time you type in a new value. Moreover, you can open the advanced mode and check how much you earn per each minute and second. Take a look at these values too, sometimes they're really surprising!

In this salary converter, we made a few assumptions for the purpose of simplifying the calculations. By default, the week is 40 hours long, but you can freely configure it according to your needs. A year is 52 weeks, and a month is 1/12 of a year.

How to calculate an hourly rate?

Here, we would like to explain to you the math behind the calculations. Let's work out how to get the hourly rate based on other given wages. Follow the step-by-step example below to understand everything correctly. For this purpose, let's assume some numbers: the annual salary in our case is $50,000, and we work 40 hours per week.

  • Annual salary to hourly wage

($50000 per year / 52 weeks) / 40 hours per week = $24.04 per hour

  • Monthly wage to hourly wage

($5000 per month * 12 / 52 weeks) / 40 hours per week = $28.85

  • Weekly paycheck to hourly rate

$1500 per week / 40 hours per week = $37.50 per hour

  • Daily wage to hourly rate

$120 per day / 8 hours = $15 per hour

Salary range

When talking about payments in specific job positions, we often use the term salary range. What does it mean? In fact, the meaning is depending on if you are an individual or a company's financiers. From an employee's viewpoint, salary range includes compensation parameters, such as overtime, as well as including benefits, like a company car or health insurance. On the other hand, for the company, it will be the amount that it is able to pay a new employee for a particular position and how much current employees can expect to earn in that specific position. Usually, companies cannot make exceptions from the salary ranges, because the numbers are strictly determined by its budget.

We can consider the salary range for a particular job position on three levels:

  • low (bottom of the range)
  • median (mid-point)
  • maximum (the maximum amount that you can expect)

For example, the yearly limits for the job position named XYZ are:

  • $20,000 (bottom)
  • $25,000 (median)
  • $30,000 (maximum)

In this case, the range is $20,000 - $30,000.

Again, a salary range grants both sides a certain amount of flexibility. From the perspective of a potential employee, they can choose the job position which will be financially satisfying; moreover, it gives them some room for negotiating the salary. On the other hand, the employer knows if the offer they make is reasonable and has a good benchmark to assess whether they can afford hiring that kind of worker.

Some aspects determine if the worker will be given an offer from the bottom of the range or if they can expect the top level amounts. These aspects might be qualifications, review scores, commitment, and work experience. Some individual achievements/successes will, of course, increase the worker's value and, in result, improve the payment level. In general, someone who is highly qualified can expect significantly higher payments than somebody with the minimal required skills.

Hourly rate vs. monthly salary

There is a significant difference in payment between hourly and salary employees. For the former, an employer pays for each hour they have worked, including overtime pay (if they have done more than 40 hours per week or other contracted number). For the second group, payment for overtime is not so obvious, and it depends on internal country (or local state) law regulations. We can find many more differences between these payment types. Let's have a look at some of them now.

Workers paid hourly are compensated by multiplying the agreed hourly rate by the total number of hours worked in a given period (e.g., month, week or day). Let's assume that hourly rate equals $14 and the employee has worked 120 hours per month (with no overtime). So, the salary looks like this: $14/hour * 120 hours= $1680. That is the compensation the worker will receive at the end of the month.

According to the Fair Labour Standards all hourly workers are non-exempt and have to be paid overtime. The overtime hours are calculated as 1.5 standard hourly rate, but can vary depending on the circumstance, e.g. working on Christmas Day. In our example it gives $14/hour * 1.5 = $21/hour. So, if the example worker from above would have an additional 10 overtime hours, their salary will be:
$14/hour * 120 hours + $21/hour * 10 overtime hours = $1890.

How much does an hourly employee work? It depends, because they usually don't have a guaranteed number of hours per week, and the hours they work is determined by a weekly schedule. It can vary a lot, especially when the shift schedule changes from week to week. This type of employees must be paid with, at least, the minimum wage (the amount varies across the U.S. states).

Let's take a closer look at salaried employees. One of the main differences is that they have a guaranteed minimal annual level of compensation. Annual wage is divided by a number of pay periods to find, e.g. the monthly salary. The vast majority of those workers are exempt employees. What does this weird term mean?

In the U.S., according to the payment rules regulated by the Fair Labour Standards, salary workers are not covered by overtime (because mostly they are exempt). It is worth mentioning, that in many countries (including the USA) companies offer their workers various kind of compensations for overtime hours. That might be just additional money, time off adequate to the number of overtime hours, or other benefits. When a salaried employee is classified as non-exempt under Fair Labour Standards, an employer has to pay one and a half for each extra hour over standard 40 per week. There are a few jobs which are exceptions from that rule (it might also differ between the states). To avoid misunderstandings, clear all your doubts in your state's Department of Labour or your country's labour law.

Pros and cons between salary vs. hourly

Let's consider some pros and cons of both types of employment. As it usual when comparing two things, we have both pros and cons for each of them. For example, if you are a monthly salary employee, you can count on more social benefits, like health insurance, parental leave, a 401(k) plan (percentage of your gross income, which you put into taxable differed retirement account) and free tickets to cultural institutions. For sure, full-time jobs consume much more of your time, the level of responsibility is higher, but they offer a possibility to develop your career. What might be motivating is a feeling of stability, thanks to the same amount of money you receive every month. One of the crucial drawbacks of that kind of work might be not being paid for overtime, meaning you will not be compensated for any extra activities (but as mentioned above, that may vary between countries).

One of the hourly-employee benefits is that your hours maybe more flexible - no 9 to 5, 5 days a week. That provides more freedom and can lead to better time management. On the other hand, while your weekly shifts are very irregular, it might be frustrating because you feel disorganized. It can also lead to a shifting number of work hours weekly (monthly, etc.) While working hourly, you can earn even more than if you were involved in a full-time job, especially if you put in a lot of overtime - you are compensated for each extra hour of work.

As you can see, lots of aspects depend on that what is important to you, what kind of contract you have and what your employer offers you in a particular company. For some people, health insurance might be more important than flexibility in working hours. Some of you might prefer to get the same monthly salary, a fixed amount of money, while others would prefer to decide on their own whether to work more or less in a given month, according to their financial needs. Consider all of the pros and cons before you choose between salary and hourly employment.

Congratulations on your new job - best time to change a job

There might be a number of reasons behind a job change. Some of them might be your current situation (e.g. burnout, dissatisfaction) and others might be external (company reorganization, reductions, etc.). If the motivation is intrinsic, you have time to prepare, but if a situation forces you to immediately change job - it is more complicated. Keep in mind that it's not always a good time to look for a new job. When your work conditions rapidly change to much worse, you might be "forced" to look for a new job immediately. And the final choice of an employer may not be right, especially when you need to take something quick instead of what would you prefer. For sure, such situations can be stressful and frustrating.

Moreover, being desperate in hunting for a new job will not make you look good as a potential employee. Factors like the economic condition of a market, especially when this condition is not good, will surely inhibit companies in opening new job offers. That can also cause problems with a quick find of a new job.

What is the conclusion? It might be not so obvious. If you have decided to change job, start looking for the new one when things are still going well at your current workplace. It will enable you to do the search calmly, and you will have all the time you need to find something much better than your current job.

Other notes

This salary converter is tax-agnostic - it deals more with time units than with money.

Hourly to salary does the same job as salary to hourly, but its fields are re-arranged, so it's easier for people who frequently calculate it the other way around (keep in mind that both calculators can do it either way).

Mateusz Mucha, Filip Derma and Tibor Pal, PhD candidate

AGIAnnual incomeBiden's Tax Plan… 22 more

How do you calculate an annual salary?

To calculate an annual salary, multiply the gross pay (before tax deductions) by the number of pay periods per year. For example, if an employee earns $1,500 per week, the individual's annual income would be 1,500 x 52 = $78,000.

How much would $18 an hour be annually?

For example, take 40 hours per week, multiplied by 52 for the number of weeks in a year, which equals 2,080, the number of hours worked. Then multiply this number by the hourly wage, which is $18 in this case. Thus, an individual working 2,080 hours annually and earning $18 per hour will make $37,440 a year.

How much does $15 an hour annually?

Based on a standard work week of 40 hours, a full-time employee works 2,080 hours per year (40 hours a week x 52 weeks a year). So if an employee makes $15 an hour working 40 hours a week, they make about $31,200 (15 multiplied by 2,080).

What is the annual salary of $45 per hour?

$45 per hour is $93,600 a year. This number is based on 40 hours of work per week and assuming it's a full-time job (8 hours per day) with vacation time paid. If you get paid bi-weekly (once every two weeks) your gross paycheck will be $3,600.