Convert your hourly wage into the equivalent annual salary. Useful for:
- Comparing job offers — one role pays $15/hour, another $30,000/year salary
- Negotiating — knowing your hourly worth helps when discussing day-rates
- Planning — understanding monthly/weekly take-home from an hourly role
How the maths works
Gross annual salary = Hourly rate × Hours per week × Weeks worked per year
Standard US full-time: - Hours per week: 37.5 (office) or 40 (industrial) - Weeks per year: 52 (unlike the UK/EU, the US has no federal law guaranteeing paid vacation — a full-time salary is a fixed annual figure regardless of any PTO taken, so 52 weeks is the right multiplier for salaried employees even though PTO itself is an employer benefit, not a legal right)
For $15/hour × 37.5 hours × 52 weeks: $29,250 annual gross.
When to use 48 vs 52 weeks
Use 52 if you have: - Permanent US employment where your paycheck doesn’t shrink when you take PTO (typical for salaried and most full-time hourly roles with employer-provided vacation) - Salaried role where holidays don’t reduce annual pay
Use fewer weeks if: - Gig or on-call work (only paid for hours worked) - Significant unpaid leave (sabbaticals, family leave) - Seasonal or contract work
What this calculator doesn’t include
- Income tax and FICA — output is gross. Run the result through the Take Home Pay calculator for net.
- Retirement contributions — a typical 401(k) contribution runs 3-6% of salary, pre-tax if deducted directly from payroll.
- Overtime, shift premia, bonuses — variable additions to the base hourly rate.
- Benefits in kind — private healthcare, gym membership, company car (these have tax implications).
US hourly rate context
- Federal minimum wage: $7.25/hour (unchanged since 2009) → $14,137.50/year at 37.5 hrs/week. Over 30 states set a higher floor — the highest, Washington, D.C. and Washington State, run around $17-18/hour.
- US median wage (full-time): BLS puts median weekly earnings for full-time workers at $1,235 (Q1 2026) — about $32.93/hour at 37.5 hrs/week, or roughly $64,220/year.
- Federal tax is marginal, not a single threshold: unlike a flat higher-rate cutoff, US federal income tax runs in brackets from 10% to 37%, and where each bracket starts depends on filing status — there isn’t one dollar figure that flips your whole rate.
- State tax stacks on top: federal taxes are uniform; states add 0-13.3% (CA highest). Your effective hourly rate after tax depends heavily on which state you live in.
Reverse calculation
If you know the salary and want the equivalent hourly rate, swap the inputs in the Salary to Hourly (use this same calculator with mode reversed by swapping inputs).
Exempt vs non-exempt — why the conversion isn't purely academic
Under the FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act), whether a role is classified as "exempt" or "non-exempt" determines whether overtime rules apply at all — and salary conversion sits right at the boundary of that classification. As of 2026, the federal salary threshold for exempt status is set annually and adjusts with inflation; roles paid below that threshold are generally entitled to overtime (time-and-a-half past 40 hours/week) regardless of job title, while roles above it and meeting the duties test are typically exempt from overtime protection entirely. This matters directly for hourly-to-salary conversions: an employer offering "$45,000/year, salaried" for a role that would otherwise be hourly and overtime-eligible is sometimes offering less real compensation than it looks like, if the role regularly requires more than 40 hours/week and the salary was set assuming no overtime pay would ever be owed.
Always check where a specific salary offer sits relative to the current exempt threshold before assuming "salaried" means better total compensation than an equivalent hourly rate — the overtime calculator shows what unpaid overtime is actually worth if a role habitually runs long hours.
Converting a day rate or freelance rate instead
Freelancers and contractors quoting a day rate need a different multiplier than a straight hourly conversion, because a day rate has to cover time that an employee's salary already has built in — no paid holiday, no sick pay, and typically no benefits, plus the self-employment tax burden an employer would otherwise share. A commonly used rule of thumb: multiply an equivalent "salaried" hourly rate by 1.5–2x to arrive at a sustainable freelance day rate covering the same take-home, before accounting for gaps between contracts. For example, a role that would pay $30/hour salaried (roughly $58,500/year at 37.5 hours × 52 weeks) might need a freelance day rate in the $360–480 range (at 8 hours/day) to deliver comparable actual take-home once self-employment tax, benefits, and unbilled downtime are factored in — see the self-employment tax calculator for the exact tax-side math on 1099 income.
A worked comparison — two job offers, same headline number
Say you're comparing two offers: Offer A is $22/hour, 40 hours/week guaranteed, no benefits. Offer B is $45,000/year salaried, includes health insurance and a 4% 401(k) match. Offer A converts to $45,760/year gross at 52 weeks (22 × 40 × 52) — almost identical to Offer B's headline number. But Offer B's benefits change the real comparison: health insurance alone commonly runs $6,000–9,000/year in employer-covered value for a single person, and the 401(k) match on a $45,000 salary at 4% is $1,800/year in essentially free money that Offer A doesn't provide at all. On a pure take-home basis the offers look equivalent; once benefits are priced in, Offer B is worth meaningfully more — this is exactly the kind of gap a headline hourly-to-salary conversion alone won't surface, which is why the conversion is a starting point for comparing offers, not the whole comparison.