Salary Calculator
Tax & IncomeConvert your pay across every pay period.
Pay & schedule
Enter your pay to see the salary breakdown.
Time off, overtime & extra pay
Enter your pay to see the salary breakdown.
How your year is counted
- Scheduled hours: 0 h/week × 0 weeks = 0 h/year.
- Work day: 0 hours (0 days/week).
- Overtime is paid at 0×× your base hourly rate.
- Every amount is gross pay — before tax or deductions.
Your inputs
| Input | Meaning | Your value |
|---|---|---|
| Enter pay as | Whether pay is entered as a yearly salary or an hourly wage. | Annual salary |
| Annual salary | The pay figure you entered. | $0 |
| Work schedule | Hours, days and weeks that define your work year. | 0 h/wk · 0 d/wk · 0 wk/yr |
Know what this estimate is based on
- Jurisdiction
- United States unless the calculator explicitly says otherwise
- Rules and time period
- Tax years supported by the selected calculator
- Scope and limitations
- Educational estimate only, not a tax return or filing determination. U.S. statutory-threshold tools use USD. Confirm current law and your facts with the relevant authority or a qualified tax professional.
- Source links checked
- Jul 30, 2026
Built and regression-tested by Smart Tools Lab. It has not been individually reviewed by a licensed financial, tax, or legal professional.
How to use
- 01
Choose whether you are entering an annual salary or an hourly wage. The calculator derives the other figure for you, so you can start from whichever number you actually know.
- 02
Set your work schedule: hours per week, days per week and weeks per year. These define your work year and drive every pay-period conversion, so a four-day week or a 50-week year is reflected exactly.
- 03
Open the advanced panel to add paid and unpaid time off in days, weekly overtime hours and their multiplier, and any annual bonus or commission.
- 04
Pick the pay period you want to highlight — hourly, daily, weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly, monthly or annual — to set the headline figure.
- 05
Read your results: gross pay in every pay period, your base and effective hourly rates, your adjusted salary after unpaid time off, and a full work-hours breakdown.
Formula
Every figure here is built from one number: your base hourly rate. In hourly mode that is the wage you enter; in salary mode it is your annual salary divided by your scheduled hours for the year (hours per week × weeks per year). Pay periods are then schedule-aware — weekly pay is the annual figure divided by your weeks per year, daily pay divides by days per week × weeks, and the hourly figure divides by scheduled hours, while monthly (÷12), semi-monthly (÷24) and bi-weekly (÷ weeks ÷ 2) follow the payroll calendar. Unpaid time off lowers your salary by the value of those hours, giving an adjusted salary; paid time off does not change your pay but does mean fewer hours actually worked. Overtime adds your base rate times the multiplier for every overtime hour, and bonus and commission are added on top. Total gross pay is the adjusted base plus overtime plus bonus and commission. Your effective hourly rate is that total divided by the hours you actually work — which is why paid time off, overtime and bonuses can push it well above your base wage. Every amount is gross, before any tax or deduction.
Example
Suppose you earn $28.00 an hour, work 40 hours across a 5-day week for 52 weeks, take 15 paid days off and 5 unpaid days, log 4 overtime hours a week at time-and-a-half, and expect a $3,000 bonus and $2,000 of commission. Your scheduled year is 40 × 52 = 2,080 hours, so the base salary is $58,240. The 5 unpaid days are 40 hours worth $1,120, trimming the adjusted salary to $57,120. Overtime adds 208 hours a year at $42.00 = $8,736, and the bonus and commission add $5,000, for $70,856 of total gross pay — about $5,904.67 a month or $2,725.23 every two weeks. You actually work 2,128 hours (1,920 regular after time off, plus 208 of overtime), so your effective rate is $70,856 ÷ 2,128 = $33.30 an hour — well above the $28.00 base, because paid time off, overtime and extra pay all lift it. Every figure is gross, before tax.
Definitions
- Base hourly rate
- Your contractual pay for one regular hour of work. In hourly mode you enter it directly; in salary mode the calculator derives it by dividing your annual salary by your scheduled hours for the year. It anchors every other figure.
- Annual salary
- Your gross pay for a full year of your normal schedule, before any tax or deduction and before bonus, commission or overtime. Divided by scheduled hours, it gives your base hourly rate.
- Gross pay
- Pay before anything is taken out. This tool reports gross figures only — it does not estimate income tax, payroll tax or any deduction, so the numbers are larger than the amount that reaches your bank account.
- Pay period (pay frequency)
- How often you are paid. Common periods are weekly, bi-weekly (every two weeks), semi-monthly (twice a month), monthly and annual. The same yearly pay splits into different paycheck amounts depending on the period.
- Bi-weekly vs semi-monthly
- Bi-weekly means 26 paychecks a year (every two weeks); semi-monthly means 24 (twice a month). Bi-weekly paychecks are therefore a little smaller, and two months each year contain three bi-weekly paydays.
- Scheduled hours
- The hours your schedule implies for the year: hours per week × weeks per year. A standard full-time year is 40 × 52 = 2,080 hours. It is the baseline for converting salary to an hourly rate.
- Paid time off (PTO)
- Holidays and vacation you are paid for. PTO does not change your salary — you are paid whether you work those hours or not — but it does reduce the hours you actually work, which lifts your effective hourly rate.
- Unpaid time off
- Leave you are not paid for. It lowers your pay by the value of the missed hours, producing an adjusted salary below your scheduled, full-year figure.
- Adjusted salary
- Your base salary after unpaid time off is subtracted. With no unpaid leave it equals your scheduled salary; each unpaid day removes one day's worth of base pay.
- Overtime
- Hours worked beyond your regular schedule, paid at a multiplier of your base rate — commonly 1.5× (time-and-a-half) or 2× (double time). This calculator multiplies your base hourly rate by the multiplier for each overtime hour.
- Bonus and commission
- Extra annual pay on top of your base salary. Bonus is usually a lump sum; commission is tied to sales or performance. Both are added to gross pay and, in the pay-period tables, spread evenly across the year.
- Effective hourly rate
- Your total gross pay divided by the hours you actually work. Because it accounts for paid time off, overtime and extra pay, it usually differs from your base wage — and is the truest measure of what an hour of your time earns.
Good to know
What a salary calculator actually does
A salary calculator answers a deceptively simple question: what is your pay worth? The reason it needs to be a tool at all is that the same earnings can be described in half a dozen different ways — an hourly wage, a weekly rate, a monthly figure, an annual salary — and people quote whichever one suits the conversation. A job ad lists an annual salary, a contractor bills by the hour, a part-time role posts a weekly rate, and a paycheck arrives every two weeks. Comparing them in your head is hard, because each hides a different set of assumptions about how many hours, days and weeks you actually work. This calculator removes the guesswork by anchoring everything to a single figure — your base hourly rate — and then expressing it in every pay period you might care about. Enter a salary and it derives the hourly rate; enter an hourly wage and it builds the salary. Once that anchor is set, converting to a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly figure is just arithmetic driven by your schedule. It is important to be clear about what the tool does not do. Every number it produces is gross — your pay before income tax, payroll tax, retirement contributions, health premiums or any other deduction. It is a conversion and comparison tool, not a paycheck estimator, and it is not payroll, legal, tax or financial advice. Keeping the focus on gross pay is what makes it genuinely useful for comparing offers: taxes and benefits vary enormously by person and place, so stripping them out gives you a clean, like-for-like baseline. Once you know how an offer converts across pay periods, a separate take-home or tax calculator can tell you what finally reaches your bank account.
Hourly, salaried, and the rate that connects them
Hourly and salaried pay feel like different worlds, but they are two views of the same thing. An hourly worker multiplies a rate by the hours they work; a salaried worker receives a fixed annual amount regardless of the exact hours in any given week. The bridge between them is the number of hours in a work year. Multiply an hourly rate by yearly hours and you get a salary; divide a salary by yearly hours and you get the equivalent hourly rate. The standard assumption is 2,080 hours — 40 hours a week for 52 weeks — which is why $25 an hour is so often quoted as roughly $52,000 a year. But that number is an assumption, not a law. Someone on a 37.5-hour week works 1,950 hours; someone who takes several unpaid weeks works fewer still; someone with a compressed four-day week packs the same hours into fewer days. Each of those changes the conversion, sometimes by thousands of dollars a year. That is why this calculator asks for your hours per week, days per week and weeks per year rather than assuming a one-size-fits-all year. When you derive an hourly rate from a salary, the hours you enter decide the answer: the same $60,000 salary is about $28.85 an hour over a full 2,080-hour year, but noticeably more per hour if your real year is shorter. Understanding this link matters in practice. It tells a salaried employee what their time is really worth by the hour, helps an hourly worker judge a salaried offer, and lets a freelancer translate a target salary into the hourly rate they need to charge to reach it.
Pay periods: why the same salary looks different each payday
One of the most common sources of confusion about pay is that the same annual salary produces different-looking paychecks depending on how often you are paid. The total over a year is identical; only the size and number of the slices change. Knowing how the slices are cut helps you read an offer and budget with confidence. Monthly pay is the simplest: twelve equal paychecks a year. Semi-monthly pay splits the year into 24 — typically the 15th and the last day of the month — so each check is a steady half-month of salary. Bi-weekly pay, by contrast, lands once every fortnight; because a year holds 52 weeks, that adds up to 26 paychecks. That one-step difference has real consequences: bi-weekly checks are slightly smaller than semi-monthly ones, and because 26 does not divide evenly into 12, two months each year contain three bi-weekly paydays — a quirk many people use for extra saving or debt payments. Weekly pay divides the year into 52, daily pay reflects the days you actually work, and the hourly figure breaks it down to a single hour. This calculator shows all of them together, with each conversion driven by your schedule rather than a fixed assumption — change your weeks per year and the weekly, daily and bi-weekly figures all move with it. Seeing the same earnings expressed every way at once makes comparisons honest: a monthly salary and a weekly rate stop being apples and oranges, and a number that sounded large or small in one period can be checked against its annual equivalent in a moment.
Building an honest work year: hours, days and weeks
The accuracy of every conversion in a salary calculator depends on one thing: a realistic picture of your work year. Three inputs build it — hours per week, days per week, and weeks per year — and together they determine your scheduled hours, your hours per day, and ultimately your hourly rate. Hours per week is the headline of your schedule. Full-time is usually 40, but 35 and 37.5 are common, and part-time roles run lower. Days per week matters because it sets your hours per day, which the calculator uses to value time off: a 40-hour week over five days is an 8-hour day, but the same 40 hours over four days is a 10-hour day, so a single day off is worth more. Weeks per year is 52 for most salaried roles, where holidays and vacation are paid out of that full year, but it can be lower for seasonal, contract or academic schedules, or for anyone who routinely takes unpaid weeks. Getting these right is what separates a back-of-envelope estimate from a meaningful one. Scheduled hours — hours per week times weeks per year — is the denominator that turns a salary into an hourly rate, so a too-high figure understates your true hourly worth and a too-low figure overstates it. The same applies in reverse when you start from an hourly wage: the schedule decides how that wage scales up to a salary. Spend a moment entering your real pattern rather than the defaults, and every downstream number — hourly rate, daily pay, the value of a vacation day — becomes something you can actually trust and act on.
Paid vs unpaid time off — and why they behave differently
Time off seems like it should simply mean less pay, but paid and unpaid leave behave in opposite ways, and understanding the difference reveals something surprising about your hourly worth. Paid time off — holidays and vacation your employer covers — does not change your salary at all. You receive the same annual amount whether or not you work those days; that is the entire point of paid leave. What it changes is the number of hours you actually work for that pay. If you earn $52,000 over a nominal 2,080-hour year but take three weeks of paid vacation, you are being paid the full $52,000 for roughly 1,960 hours of actual work. Your effective hourly rate quietly rises, because the same money is spread over fewer worked hours. More paid time off, counter-intuitively, makes each hour you do work more valuable. Unpaid time off works the other way. Because you are not paid for it, it reduces your earnings directly. The calculator converts your unpaid days into hours using your schedule, values them at your base hourly rate, and subtracts the total to produce an adjusted salary — your real pay once the unpaid leave is accounted for. Five unpaid days on a $52,000 salary, for instance, remove about $1,000, leaving roughly $51,000. Separating the two is what makes the picture honest. Lumping all time off together would either overstate your pay (by ignoring unpaid leave) or understate it (by treating paid leave as a loss). By tracking them apart, the calculator shows both your adjusted salary — what unpaid leave really costs you — and your effective hourly rate, which captures the hidden value of the paid time off you may not have been counting.
Overtime, bonus and commission: the pay beyond your base
Base salary is rarely the whole story. Overtime, bonus and commission can add a meaningful share of annual earnings, and because they each behave differently, it helps to see how the calculator folds them in. Overtime is extra hours beyond your regular schedule, paid at a premium. The most common rate is time-and-a-half — 1.5× your base hourly rate — but some roles pay double time, and the calculator lets you set the multiplier. It then pays that rate for every overtime hour across your weeks. A worker earning $30 an hour who logs five overtime hours a week at 1.5× adds 260 hours a year at $45, or $11,700 — a substantial top-up that pure salary figures miss entirely. Note that many salaried, exempt roles are not paid overtime at all; if that is you, leave the overtime hours at zero. Bonus and commission are annual amounts layered on top of your base. A bonus is typically a lump sum tied to company or personal performance; commission is usually tied to sales. The calculator adds both to your gross pay and, in the pay-period and comparison tables, spreads them evenly across the year so you can see their average effect on each paycheck. That even split is a modelling choice for clarity — in reality these payments often arrive in a single check or a few times a year, so treat the per-period figure as an average rather than a literal line on every payslip. Seeing base, overtime and variable pay broken out side by side is genuinely useful. It shows how much of your income is guaranteed versus dependent on hours or performance, which matters when you weigh a steady salary against a role that dangles a large but uncertain bonus.
Base rate vs effective rate: what an hour of your time is really worth
The single most useful number this calculator produces may be one that rarely appears on a payslip: your effective hourly rate. It answers a question your base wage cannot — once everything is counted, what does an hour of your time actually earn? Your base hourly rate is the headline figure: the contractual amount for one regular hour. Your effective hourly rate is your total gross pay divided by the hours you genuinely work. The two diverge for several reasons, and each is informative. Paid time off pushes the effective rate up, because you collect pay for hours you do not work. Overtime, bonus and commission push it up too, by adding earnings without adding a proportional number of hours. The result is usually an effective rate noticeably above your base wage — a fuller measure of your time's value. Consider the worked example elsewhere on this page: a $28-an-hour base, with paid time off, overtime and a bonus, produces an effective rate of about $33.30 an hour. That gap is not an accident or an error; it is the combined value of leave you are paid for and pay that is not tied to extra hours. Looked at the other way, heavy unpaid leave or long unpaid hours would drag the effective rate below the base — a warning sign worth noticing. This number is powerful for comparisons. Two jobs can quote the same salary yet deliver very different effective rates once you account for hours worked, generous or stingy leave, and overtime expectations. A role with a slightly lower salary but far better time off can leave you earning more per hour of your life. Anchoring on the effective rate, rather than the headline salary alone, is how you compare what really matters.
Sanity-checking a conversion before you trust it
Pay conversions are easy to get wrong, and a number that is off by a factor of two can quietly distort a big decision. A few quick habits keep you honest. The most common slip is mixing up bi-weekly and semi-monthly: they sound interchangeable but produce 26 versus 24 paychecks a year, so multiplying a bi-weekly figure by 24 — or a semi-monthly one by 26 — overstates or understates annual pay by thousands. When in doubt, convert everything to annual first and work back down from there. A second trap is the hidden hours assumption. Quoting a salary as an hourly rate using 2,080 hours is fine for a standard full-timer, but it quietly breaks for anyone on a shorter week, a part-year schedule, or a four-day pattern. If your real year is 1,800 hours, dividing your salary by 2,080 understates your true hourly worth by more than ten percent. Always check that the hours, days and weeks behind a conversion match your actual schedule rather than a default. A third is treating gross like net. Because every figure here is before tax and deductions, an hourly rate that looks generous can shrink substantially once income tax, payroll tax and benefits come out. Never compare a gross figure from this tool against a take-home number from your bank statement; compare gross with gross, then apply taxes separately. Finally, watch how variable pay is being counted. Spreading a bonus or commission evenly across the year is useful for comparison, but it can flatter a paycheck that, in reality, is lean most of the year and lumpy at bonus time. If steady cash flow matters to you, look at the base-only figures alongside the totals. The simplest sanity check of all is the round trip: take your annual figure, convert it to hourly, then multiply back up by your yearly hours. If you do not land roughly where you started, an assumption is off somewhere — usually the hours. Spending thirty seconds on that check, and on confirming which pay period and which schedule you are really comparing, turns a rough guess into a number you can take into a negotiation or a budget with confidence. None of this is financial advice, but it is the discipline that keeps a conversion from misleading you.
Using your number: offers, raises and side-by-side comparisons
A salary figure is only as useful as the decisions it helps you make. Once you can convert pay fluidly across periods and see your effective hourly rate, several common situations become much easier to navigate. When you weigh a job offer, convert it into the period you think in. If you budget monthly, see the monthly gross; if you currently work by the hour, compare the offer's effective hourly rate to what you earn now. A salary that sounds like a raise can turn out to be flat — or worse — once a longer commute, more hours or a four-day-week schedule is taken into account, and the per-hour view exposes that quickly. The save-and-compare feature lets you store two or more scenarios side by side, so an hourly contract and a salaried role can be lined up on the same terms. When you negotiate a raise, the conversions help you frame the ask in concrete terms — what a given percentage means weekly, or what hourly rate matches your target salary. When you take on extra work, the overtime and effective-rate figures show whether the additional hours are genuinely worth it or whether they quietly lower your per-hour earnings. And when you plan time off, the split between paid and unpaid leave makes the real cost of an unpaid week visible before you commit to it. Throughout, remember the calculator's boundaries. The conversions are exact for what you enter, but they remain an estimate of a messier reality of irregular hours, variable commission and employer-specific rules — and they stop at gross pay. Use the result as a clear, shared language for talking about pay and a fast way to compare options, then turn to a tax or take-home tool to see what actually lands in your account. None of it is payroll, legal, tax or financial advice; it is a way to understand your own number well enough to act on it with confidence.
Frequently asked questions
How do I convert an hourly wage to an annual salary?
Multiply your hourly wage by the hours you work in a year. For a standard schedule that is 40 hours a week across 52 weeks, or 2,080 hours, so $25 an hour is about $52,000 a year. This calculator does it automatically and lets you change the hours, days and weeks so the result matches your real schedule rather than the 2,080-hour default.
How do I convert an annual salary to an hourly rate?
Divide your salary by your scheduled hours for the year. On a 2,080-hour full-time year, a $60,000 salary works out to about $28.85 an hour. If you work fewer weeks or shorter days, your hourly rate is higher than the simple division suggests, which is why entering your actual schedule matters.
What's the difference between bi-weekly and semi-monthly pay?
Bi-weekly pay arrives every two weeks, so you get 26 paychecks a year; semi-monthly pay arrives twice a month, for 24. The same annual salary therefore produces slightly smaller bi-weekly checks, and with bi-weekly pay two months a year contain three paydays. The pay-period table shows both side by side.
Why is my effective hourly rate higher than my wage?
Your effective rate is total gross pay divided by the hours you actually work. Paid time off means you are paid for hours you do not work, and overtime, bonus and commission add pay without adding proportional hours — so all of them lift your effective rate above your base wage. It is the most honest measure of what each worked hour earns.
Does paid time off change my salary?
No. Paid time off — holidays and vacation — is pay you receive whether or not you work those hours, so your salary is unchanged. What it does change is your effective hourly rate: with fewer hours actually worked for the same pay, each worked hour is worth more.
How does unpaid time off affect my pay?
Unpaid leave lowers your pay by the value of the missed hours. The calculator converts unpaid days into hours using your schedule, multiplies by your base rate, and subtracts the result, giving an adjusted salary below your scheduled full-year figure. Five unpaid days on a $52,000 salary, for example, trims it by about $1,000.
How is overtime calculated?
Enter your overtime hours per week and a multiplier (1.5× by default). The calculator pays your base hourly rate times the multiplier for every overtime hour, across all your weeks. Salaried, exempt roles often are not paid overtime at all — in that case leave the overtime hours at zero.
Are bonus and commission included in the pay-period figures?
Yes. Bonus and commission are added to your gross pay, and in the pay-period and comparison tables they are spread evenly across the year so you can see their average effect on each paycheck. In real life they often arrive as lump sums rather than in every check, so treat the per-period split as an average.
Is this my take-home pay?
No. Every figure here is gross pay, before income tax, Social Security, Medicare, retirement contributions or any other deduction. To estimate what actually lands in your bank account, use a take-home pay or paycheck calculator that models taxes and withholdings.
How many work hours are in a year?
A standard US full-time year is 2,080 hours — 40 hours a week for 52 weeks. Real schedules vary: a 37.5-hour week is 1,950 hours, and accounting for unpaid weeks lowers it further. Because this tool lets you set hours, days and weeks, you are not locked into the 2,080-hour assumption.
What should I enter for hours, days and weeks?
Use your normal schedule. Hours per week and days per week set your typical work pattern (and your hours per day); weeks per year is usually 52, but you can lower it if you take unpaid weeks or work a seasonal year. These figures drive the hourly, daily and weekly conversions, so getting them right makes the rates accurate.
How accurate is this calculator?
The conversions are exact for the schedule and figures you enter, but they are still an estimate of your situation: real pay can involve irregular hours, shift differentials, varying commission and employer-specific rounding. Use the result as a clear, like-for-like way to compare offers and pay structures, not as a guarantee of any specific paycheck.