Guide
Comparing a salaried job to an hourly one, or just curious what your yearly pay works out to per hour, comes down to one number: the total hours you work in a year. Get that right and the conversion is simple arithmetic. Get it wrong — by ignoring unpaid time off, unpaid overtime, or a non-standard schedule — and you can be off by several dollars an hour without realizing it. This guide walks through the exact formulas, the assumptions built into them, and the adjustments that make the answer match your real life.
Most full-time jobs assume a 40-hour week across 52 weeks, which equals 2,080 hours per year. To turn an annual salary into an hourly rate, divide the salary by that number:
The number 2,080 is a convention, not a law. It assumes you're paid for every one of those 52 weeks, including any holidays and vacation — which is how most salaried, exempt positions in the United States actually work. If your role is structured differently, adjust the hours figure rather than forcing your pay into the standard mold.
Here's how several common salaries break down at the standard 2,080 hours a year:
| Annual salary | Per hour | Per month | Per week |
|---|---|---|---|
| $30,000 | $14.42 | $2,500 | $576.92 |
| $45,000 | $21.63 | $3,750 | $865.38 |
| $60,000 | $28.85 | $5,000 | $1,153.85 |
| $80,000 | $38.46 | $6,666.67 | $1,538.46 |
| $120,000 | $57.69 | $10,000 | $2,307.69 |
To convert an hourly wage into an annual salary, reverse it — multiply your hourly rate by the hours you work each week, then by the weeks you work per year:
A quick shortcut many people use: double your hourly rate and add three zeros. $25/hour roughly equals $50,000 a year. It's not exact, but it's close enough for a gut check. The shortcut works because 40 hours × 52 weeks = 2,080, which is very close to 2,000 — the number you'd get from the "double and add three zeros" trick. The gap (about 4%) is why the estimate always comes in a little low.
The 2,080-hour assumption breaks down the moment your real schedule differs from it. Several things commonly shift the number:
This is exactly why salaried roles that "sound" higher can pay less per hour than an hourly job. Always convert to a true hourly rate before comparing. Non-exempt hourly employees, by contrast, are entitled to overtime pay of at least 1.5 times their regular rate for hours worked beyond 40 in a workweek under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, which is one reason the same nominal wage can play out very differently between a salaried and an hourly position.
Suppose you're weighing a $75,000 salaried offer. On paper, the standard math says $75,000 ÷ 2,080 = $36.06 per hour. But the role realistically expects 48-hour weeks, and you'd take one unpaid week each year. Recalculate with your real numbers:
That's more than five dollars an hour below the headline figure — a 15% difference that would be invisible if you trusted the 2,080-hour shortcut. If a competing hourly job paid $34 an hour for a steady 40-hour week, it would actually out-earn the "bigger" salary on a per-hour basis while giving you eight hours a week back.
Every figure above is gross — before taxes. Federal income tax plus the two FICA payroll taxes the IRS sets — Social Security at 6.2% and Medicare at 1.45% of wages — and any state tax typically reduce take-home pay by 20–35% depending on your filing status, income level, and where you live. (Social Security applies only up to an annual wage base, $176,100 in 2025; earnings above that are exempt from the 6.2% but still owe the 1.45% Medicare tax.) Your hourly conversion tells you what you earn, not what lands in your bank account. Two people with the same gross hourly rate can take home noticeably different amounts once filing status, pre-tax retirement contributions, and state taxes are factored in.
The salary to hourly calculator handles all of this automatically — enter your salary, your real hours, and the weeks you actually work, and it shows your true hourly rate plus a full pay-period breakdown.
How many work hours are in a year? The standard full-time figure is 2,080 hours — 40 hours a week across 52 weeks. Your actual number will be lower if you take unpaid time off and higher if you regularly work beyond 40 hours a week.
Does the 2,080-hour figure include vacation and holidays? For most salaried employees, yes. Because you're paid the same amount whether or not a given week contains a holiday, the standard conversion treats all 52 weeks as paid. Hourly workers who aren't paid for time off should base the calculation on the weeks they actually get paid.
Why is my calculated hourly rate different from a coworker's on the same salary? Almost always because you work different real hours. Identical salaries divided by different total hours produce different true hourly rates — someone routinely working 45-hour weeks earns less per hour than someone holding to 40, even on the exact same pay.
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