Salary converter

Type what you earn and say what that is. Every other way of expressing it appears at once — hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly — with the assumptions it took written underneath, because those assumptions are the conversion.

A month is not four weeks

There are 52 weeks in a year and twelve months, so a month is 4.333 weeks, not four. Multiplying a weekly wage by four to get a monthly one leaves out four weeks of the year: on £30,000 that is £192 a month, or about 7.7% of the pay packet.

Every figure on this page goes through the year rather than from one period to the next, so the months always add up to the year and the weeks always add up to the year. That is the only way to make them agree with each other.

The assumptions are the conversion

There is no arithmetic that turns £15 an hour into a salary. You have to say how many hours a week and how many weeks a year, and different countries assume different things: 40 hours over 52 weeks is the American default and gives £31,200, while 37.5 hours over 52 weeks is a common British one and gives £29,250. Same rate, £1,950 apart.

So this page prints what it assumed on every reading rather than burying it in a help page. If the numbers look wrong, the assumption is the first thing to check, and it is the first thing you are shown.

Paid holiday, and the difference it makes

A salaried job pays you for 52 weeks whether you are at your desk or on a beach. Hourly and agency work often does not, and if you take four unpaid weeks then your hourly rate buys you 48 weeks of pay, not 52 — which makes the same rate worth about 8% less over a year.

Which way that cuts depends on what you typed. If you gave an hourly or weekly rate, unpaid weeks are money you never earn and the yearly figure falls. If you gave a salary, the yearly figure is the thing you were given and cannot fall — instead the same money is spread over fewer weeks, so the weekly and hourly figures go up. The reading says which of those it did.

Where to go next

If the number you started with came from somewhere else:

• hours worked calculator — what the week actually added up to
• percentage calculator — and what a rise or a cut does to it

What this does not do

No tax, no National Insurance, no pension, no student loan. These are gross figures — what an employer pays, not what arrives in your account — and the gap between those two is large, personal, and changes every April.

Overtime, shift premiums, bonuses and salary sacrifice are not modelled either. This converts one number between periods; it does not work out what you are worth or what you will keep.