Salary ↔ Hourly Calculator

Choose your conversion direction with the toggle. "Salary → Hourly" treats your input as an annual salary and divides by hours worked. "Hourly → Salary" treats your input as a wage and multiplies up to an annual figure.

Enter the amount, then adjust hours per week and weeks per year as needed. The defaults are 40 hours and 52 weeks (the standard "2,080 hours per year" assumption used in most employment math). Real-world W-2 employees with paid vacation may actually work closer to 2,000 hours; freelancers bill much less.

The result panel shows your equivalent rate at every common time scale: hourly, daily (8 hour), weekly, monthly, and annual. Use it to double-check job offers, compare gig pay, or sanity-check your contract rate against a salaried equivalent.

For the reference table at the bottom, we use the standard 40 × 52 = 2,080 hours per year baseline. Common salaries ($30K to $200K in $10K increments) are shown with their hourly equivalents — useful as a quick lookup.

Annual salary divided by 2,080 hours is the standard hourly conversion: $50,000 ÷ 2,080 = $24.04/hour. This is the math most employers use when posting both salary and hourly rates for similar positions, so it is a defensible baseline.

But this is a W-2 hourly equivalent, not a freelance rate. Freelancers cover their own taxes (15.3% self-employment tax + federal + state income tax), health insurance, retirement, equipment, software, and the gap between projects out of every billable dollar. A useful conversion: freelance hourly rate ≈ W-2 annual salary ÷ 1,000. So a $100K W-2 equivalent role generally maps to roughly a $100/hour freelance rate.

For job offers, look beyond the headline rate. Total compensation includes health insurance (often $5,000–$15,000 of value), retirement match (typically 3–6% of salary), paid time off (10–20 days), and any equity. A $80K offer with full benefits beats a $90K offer with no benefits in most cases.

For salaried "exempt" employees, your effective hourly rate drops as expected working hours rise. If you are formally a $100K salary but routinely work 60-hour weeks, your effective hourly rate is $32.05 (instead of $48.08 at 40 hours). This is why salaried tech workers in burnout-heavy roles often calculate themselves out as being underpaid versus contract equivalents.

Use the reference table to anchor expectations. $50K = $24/hour; $75K = $36/hour; $100K = $48/hour; $150K = $72/hour; $200K = $96/hour. These are the baseline conversions assuming 40 × 52 hours. Adjust upward for fewer working hours, downward for more.