Salary Calculator

What this salary calculator does

This tool converts any pay figure — whether you know your hourly rate, a weekly stipend, a biweekly paycheck, a monthly retainer, or a headline annual salary — into every other standard pay period in one step. Enter your amount, choose the period it belongs to, and every equivalent figure updates instantly.

Beyond simple unit conversion, the calculator lets you customise hours per week and weeks per year. That matters more than it sounds: a nurse working 36-hour weeks earns a meaningfully different annual figure than a consultant clocking 50, even at the same hourly rate. Adjust those two inputs to reflect your actual schedule and the numbers become accurate rather than approximate.

The results shown are gross pay — the amount before income tax, social-security contributions, health insurance premiums, and retirement deductions are taken out. Estimating your actual take-home (net pay) requires knowing your country, state or province, filing status, and benefit elections. The section below explains how to think through that.

How salary conversions work

All conversions flow through a single anchor: the annual figure. Once you have that, every other period is just arithmetic:

The 2,080-hour shortcut (40 hours × 52 weeks) is widely used in job postings and compensation benchmarks. It assumes zero unpaid time off. If you actually take two weeks of unpaid leave, your effective work year is 2,000 hours — and that changes the true hourly value of an equivalent annual salary.

Gross vs net: gross pay is the number printed on an offer letter or pay stub before any deductions. Net pay — what lands in your bank account — is always lower. The gap depends on your marginal income-tax rate, payroll taxes (Social Security, Medicare or their equivalents outside the US), and voluntary deductions such as health-insurance premiums and 401(k) contributions. A common rule of thumb for US workers is that net pay runs roughly 65–75 % of gross, but the actual number varies significantly.

Worked example: $25 per hour

Let's walk through the full conversion for someone earning $25 an hour at a standard full-time schedule (40 h/week, 52 weeks/year).

Those are gross figures. Estimating net (take-home) pay at $52,000 per year for a single filer in the US with standard deductions (2024 tax year): federal income tax comes to roughly $4,500–$5,500; FICA (Social Security 6.2 % + Medicare 1.45 %) adds another ~$3,978; a typical state tax might add $1,500–$3,000. Total deductions could easily reach $10,000–$12,500, leaving take-home pay of roughly $39,500–$42,000 per year, or about $1,520–$1,615 per biweekly paycheck.

Net figures depend heavily on location, filing status, benefits elections, and other factors — see the disclaimer at the bottom of this page. If you owe taxes at a different rate, use our tax bracket calculator to estimate your liability more precisely.

Gross vs net pay: what gets deducted?

The journey from gross to net involves several layers of deductions, some mandatory and some optional:

Pre-tax deductions like a 401(k) contribution or health-insurance premium lower your taxable income, meaning they reduce your tax bill by more than their face value. If your marginal rate is 22 % and you contribute $200 per biweekly paycheck to a 401(k), the actual reduction in your take-home pay is only about $156 — not $200 — because you avoid $44 in income tax on that $200.

Tips and common mistakes

• !Confusing gross with take-home. Job-offer letters always quote gross salary. The number on the offer is not what hits your bank account — plan your budget around net, not gross.
• !Ignoring unpaid time off in hourly-to-salary conversions. The 2,080-hour year assumes you are paid for every week, including holidays. If you take two weeks of unpaid vacation, your actual paid hours drop to 1,920, making your effective hourly rate for the same salary about 4 % higher — or making a quoted hourly rate worth 4 % less annually.
• !Overlooking the value of benefits. A salary of $60,000 with employer-paid health insurance, a 5 % 401(k) match, and four weeks of paid leave may be worth more in total compensation than a $70,000 offer with no benefits. Calculate the dollar value of each benefit before comparing offers.
• !Mixing biweekly and semimonthly. Biweekly (every two weeks) gives 26 paychecks per year; semimonthly (twice a month) gives 24. For the same annual salary, a biweekly paycheck is smaller than a semimonthly one. Always verify which cadence your employer uses when building a monthly budget.
• !Forgetting self-employment tax for contractors. If you are a 1099 contractor, you pay both the employee and employer halves of FICA — 15.3 % total — rather than the 7.65 % split with an employer. A contractor rate needs to be roughly 20–30 % higher than an equivalent W-2 salary to net the same take-home pay.

If you need to calculate sales tax on purchases, try our VAT / sales tax calculator. For quick proportional comparisons between salaries, our percentage calculator is handy.