Salary Calculator – Hourly, Monthly & Annual Income

What this calculator does, and what it cannot decide

This page is pay arithmetic. It takes one pay figure, a schedule in hours per week and weeks per year, and an optional allowance for time off, and it converts that figure between frequencies. Every number it prints is gross pay: what the job pays before anything is removed from it.

What it does not do is determine anything. It holds no tax tables, no withholding schedule, no FICA rates, no benefit or retirement arithmetic and no overtime rule, so it cannot tell you what will land in your account. It also takes no view on what a job should pay, whether a rate is lawful, or whether the hours you typed are the hours you are owed for. Those are questions about employment and tax, not about division, and a converter cannot answer them. What it can do, it does exactly.

Where the 2,080-hour year comes from, and who uses 2,087

The familiar figure is simply 40 hours multiplied by 52 weeks, which gives 2,080. It is a convention, not a legal definition, and its appeal is that it makes the conversion reversible: an annual salary divided by 2,080 gives an hourly rate that multiplies straight back.

Federal pay does not use it. 5 U.S.C. § 5504(b)(1) directs that an annual rate be divided by 2,087 to reach an hourly rate, a figure that averages the number of working hours across a 28-year cycle so that leap years are absorbed. The seven-hour gap is small per hour and not nothing across a career: on a $60,000 salary, 2,080 gives $28.85 an hour and 2,087 gives $28.75. This calculator uses your hours and weeks rather than either constant, so entering 40 and 52 reproduces the 2,080 convention. If you need the federal figure, the honest way to get it here is to divide the salary by 2,087 yourself, because the tool multiplies weeks by hours and cannot be made to land on 2,087 exactly.

Working it out by hand

Both modes are short enough to check on paper, which is the point of showing them.

Time off means different things in each mode

This is the difference most likely to surprise you, and it is deliberate rather than an oversight. In Salary to Hourly mode the field is labelled paid time off, and paid leave does not reduce a salary, so the annual figure is untouched and a second hourly rate appears alongside the first. In Hourly to Salary mode the field is labelled unpaid time off, and unpaid weeks pay nothing, so the annual total falls.

The practical rule is to read the label rather than assume the behaviour carries across when you switch modes. Salaried leave changes the rate; hourly leave changes the total.

When the pay-period rows do not multiply back

There is one case where the breakdown will not reconcile the way you expect, and it is better said than discovered. In Hourly to Salary mode with unpaid time off set, the weekly, biweekly and daily rows describe a week you actually work, while the annual figure has had the unpaid weeks taken out of it.

Take the worked example above: $30 an hour, 35 hours, 2 unpaid weeks. The weekly row is $1,050 and the biweekly row is $2,100, because a fortnight of work pays two weeks of work. Multiplying that biweekly figure by the usual 26 gives $54,600, while the annual total reads $52,500. Nothing is broken. The $2,100 answers what a worked fortnight pays, and the $52,500 answers what the year pays after two unpaid weeks. The semi-monthly and monthly rows divide the annual figure and so do reconcile. With the time off field left empty, every row multiplies back exactly.

Semi-monthly is not biweekly

These two are confused constantly and they are not the same schedule. Biweekly means every two weeks, which gives 26 pay periods across a year and occasionally 27, because 52 weeks do not divide a calendar evenly. Semi-monthly means twice a month, on fixed dates, which gives exactly 24 every year without exception.

The consequence is that a semi-monthly cheque is always larger than a biweekly one for the same salary, since the same money is divided into fewer payments. On $60,000 the semi-monthly figure is $2,500.00 and the biweekly is $2,307.69. The annual totals are identical.

A $60,000 salary across every pay period

Computed at 40 hours per week and 52 weeks per year. Every row can be reproduced in the tool above:

Gross pay is not take-home pay

Every figure on this page is gross. What actually reaches your account is smaller, and by how much depends on federal income tax, Social Security and Medicare, any state and local income tax, and whatever you have elected for retirement, health cover and other pre-tax items. None of that is computed here and none of it is estimated here.

This matters most when you are comparing two offers. Two jobs with the same gross can leave you with very different amounts if they sit in different states or carry different benefit costs. The paycheck calculator is the page that models deductions.

Edge cases

• An empty field is not a zero. Clearing an input leaves the result waiting rather than computing from a blank. A value that is not a number is reported as an error instead of being silently coerced.
• Hours and weeks must be above zero. Both feed a denominator, so the tool rejects zero and negative entries with a message rather than dividing by nothing.
• Time off cannot reach or exceed weeks per year. Fifty-two weeks off out of fifty-two would leave no working weeks at all, so the tool refuses it in both modes.
• The frequency selector does not offer hourly or daily. In Salary to Hourly mode you can enter a weekly, fortnightly, twice-monthly, monthly or yearly amount. If what you have is an hourly rate, the other mode is the one you want.
• Weeks per year does not move the period rows. It feeds the hourly rate only. This is intentional and is explained above; the period rows use fixed annual-equivalent counts.
• Nothing here is prorated for a partial year. Starting a job in March does not make the annual figure wrong, it makes it an annualised rate rather than what you will receive this calendar year.

Your pay details stay in the page

The salary, rate and hours you enter are processed by this page in your browser. They are not sent to a server, not stored after you close the tab, and not visible to anyone else. There is no account and nothing to sign up for.

Related tools

• What is annual income for the guide that explains the conversions this page performs, including why semi-monthly and biweekly are not the same thing.
• Paycheck calculator to estimate take-home pay after deductions, which this page does not do.
• Salary to hourly calculator for that single conversion on a page of its own.
• Hourly to salary calculator for the reverse, and the page that now answers for the retired annual salary calculator URL.
• Overtime calculator when hours beyond a threshold are paid at a premium, which the flat schedule here does not model.
• Pay raise calculator for what a percentage increase does to each of these figures.
• Time and a half calculator for the standard 1.5× premium on its own.

Sources

Converting pay between frequencies is arithmetic, and the divisors this page uses are conventions rather than rules any body sets. The one figure with a statutory source is the alternative to them: 5 U.S.C. § 5504(b)(1) directs that a federal annual rate be divided by 2,087 to reach an hourly rate. It is cited for that and nothing else.

It is not authority for the 52, 26, 24 and 12 divisors, which are ordinary payroll convention, and it does not govern private employment. No source is claimed for tax, withholding or take-home figures, because this page does not produce any.