An hourly rate and an annual salary are the same number wearing different clothes — but only if you agree on how many hours a year go into the conversion. This tool moves between the two in either direction, using the hours per week and weeks per year you set yourself, so a contractor weighing a $50-an-hour gig against a salaried offer is finally comparing like with like instead of guessing.
How it works
Everything hinges on one figure: the hours you work in a year, which is simply your hours per week multiplied by your weeks per year. Once that is fixed, the two conversions are mirror images. Going from an hourly rate to a salary, the tool multiplies your rate by those annual hours. Going the other way, it divides the salary by the same annual hours to recover the rate.
From there it fills in the numbers you care about day to day. Monthly pay is the annual figure divided by twelve, and weekly pay is your hourly rate times your hours per week. Because annual hours drive all of it, changing either the hours per week or the weeks per year moves every output at once — the same salary spread over more weeks quietly lowers the implied hourly rate.
Worked example
Take a rate of $50 an hour, worked 40 hours a week across 48 weeks of the year.
- Annual hours: 40 × 48 = 1,920 hours
- Annual salary: $50 × 1,920 = $96,000
- Monthly salary: $96,000 ÷ 12 = $8,000
- Weekly pay: $50 × 40 = $2,000
The conversion is fully reversible. Feed $96,000 back in with the same 40 hours and 48 weeks and it returns exactly $50 an hour — the arithmetic is symmetrical, so a salary you compute here always translates back to the rate you started from. Swap in a different work year, though, and the answer moves: the same $96,000 stretched across a full 2,080-hour year implies about $46.15 an hour, which is why the hours you enter matter as much as the dollars.
How to interpret your result
Every figure here is gross — before income tax, self-employment tax, or any withholding — so it measures the size of a paycheck, not what clears into your account. It is a unit conversion, not a comparison of total compensation.
That distinction matters most when you line up a contract rate against a salaried job. The output is only ever as honest as the hours you feed it: the same rate across 52 weeks and across 46 weeks produces two different salaries, and only one matches your real calendar. Use this to quote a project, sanity-check an offer, or see the monthly cash flow a rate implies. When you need to weigh a contract against employment properly — folding in benefits, unpaid time, and business costs — reach for the freelance hourly rate calculator instead, which is built for exactly that.
Methodology & sources
The math is deliberately plain: annual hours = hours per week × weeks per year, then salary = hourly × annual hours or, in reverse, hourly = salary ÷ annual hours. Monthly pay is annual ÷ 12 and weekly pay is hourly × hours per week. The only assumption is that every week you enter is a paid one, so freelancers should count paid weeks rather than calendar weeks.
The familiar 2,080-hour figure — 40 hours across 52 weeks — is a benchmark, not a measurement. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' American Time Use Survey tracks how many hours people actually put in, and for most workers the real total falls below 2,080 once holidays and time off are counted. That is exactly why the calculator asks for your own weeks per year instead of assuming a full 52.