Salary to Hourly Rate Calculator

It depends on hours, not a magic number

There is no single divisor that turns a salary into an hourly rate — it depends on how many hours you work each week and how many weeks you work each year. The common shortcut of dividing by 2,080 assumes 40 hours across 52 weeks with no time off, which rarely matches reality.

Set your real weekly hours and working weeks, and the conversion becomes accurate in both directions.

For freelancers, this is a floor

A salary-equivalent hourly rate ignores the costs and unpaid time that freelancing adds. Use it as a sanity check against an employed role, then price above it once self-employment costs are factored in.

The 2,080-hour convention and where it breaks

The standard conversion assumes 40 hours a week across 52 weeks — 2,080 hours — and quietly treats paid holiday as worked time. That is fine for comparing two salaried jobs, because both sides carry the same assumption. It falls apart the moment one side is freelance.

If you are converting a salary in order to price freelance work, this number is a starting point and nothing more: it is the employee's hourly cost of time, not the rate a freelancer needs. Take the result to the hourly rate calculator, which adds the business costs, the tax you now pay yourself, and the hours you cannot bill. Expect the honest freelance figure to be roughly two to three times what this conversion produces.