Salary calculator

The conventions this page uses

Converting an hourly rate into a yearly salary sounds like one multiplication. It is one multiplication and three assumptions, and calculators disagree because the assumptions differ rather than because the arithmetic does.

Here they are, stated rather than hidden. A year is fifty-two weeks. A full-time week is whatever you put in the hours field, forty by default. A working week is whatever you put in the days field, five by default. Everything on the page follows from those three numbers, and changing any of them changes every row.

Fifty-two weeks is 364 days, one short of a calendar year and two in a leap year. That is the standard trade in every weekly-to-yearly conversion, and it is why a weekly wage multiplied up here lands slightly under what fifty-two and a seventh weeks would give. Nobody is paid in sevenths of a week, so the convention is the honest one.

Unadjusted and adjusted

The two columns answer two different questions, and which one is yours depends on how you are paid rather than on what you prefer.

The left column treats every working day in the year as paid. That is what a salary means: you are paid the same whether a public holiday falls on a Monday or not, and taking leave does not reduce your pay. For salaried work, the left column is the answer and the right one is irrelevant.

The right column takes the days off out of the year. That is what hourly work means: a day not worked is a day not paid, so twenty-five days of holidays and leave is twenty-five days of income that does not exist. For hourly and contract work, the right column is the answer.

This is also the single largest reason an hourly rate and a salary that look equivalent are not. A contractor quoting an hourly rate against a salaried job has to cover unpaid time off before anything else, and the gap between the two columns is exactly that cost.

Why the semi-monthly and fortnightly rows differ

Twice a month is twenty-four payments a year. Every two weeks is twenty-six. The yearly total is identical and the individual payments are not, by about eight per cent. If you are comparing an offer quoted per pay period against your current pay per pay period, check which cycle each one uses before concluding anything.

What this does not do

It does not touch tax. Every figure here is gross, before income tax, before social contributions, before anything your employer withholds. For what actually reaches your account, the salary after tax pages take a gross figure and a place, and the paycheck calculator takes the same and divides it by your pay cycle.

It also does not know about overtime rules, shift premiums, on-call allowances, thirteenth-month payments, or any of the other ways a real contract adds to a headline rate. Those are contractual, not arithmetic, and inventing a rule for them would make the page confidently wrong.

Common questions

Which hours figure should I use for a part-time job?

The hours you actually work in a normal week. If you work three days of eight hours, put twenty-four in hours and three in days; the daily rate then reflects a real day rather than an eighth of a full-time week.

Should I count public holidays as unpaid?

Only if you are not paid for them. Most salaried contracts in Europe and the United States pay public holidays, in which case they belong in the left column. Hourly work frequently does not, and in several European countries paid leave is a statutory minimum rather than a negotiation, so the answer depends on the contract in front of you rather than on the country alone.

Why is the daily rate not the hourly rate times eight?

Because it is the hourly rate times your hours divided by your days. With forty hours over five days those are the same thing. With thirty-seven and a half hours over five days they are not, and the page follows the numbers you gave it rather than assuming an eight-hour day.

Does the quarterly row mean anything?

It is there because bonuses, contractor invoices and budget lines are often quoted per quarter. Nobody is paid on a quarterly payroll cycle.

Is anything I type stored?

No. Nothing is sent anywhere and the access log for this site drops the query string, so the numbers you enter are never written down.