Convert your annual salary to an hourly rate — or your hourly rate to annual. Adjust for your working pattern.
Gross figures only. Not financial or tax advice. Consult an accountant for net pay.
Understanding your effective hourly rate has practical applications beyond curiosity. It allows you to compare job offers with different structures (salary vs contract), evaluate whether overtime or additional work is worth doing, and understand the true cost of unpaid overtime that is common in salaried positions.
The most common conversion: divide annual salary by 2,080 (52 weeks × 40 hours). A £40,000 salary equals approximately £19.23/hour. A £60,000 salary equals approximately £28.85/hour. A £100,000 salary equals approximately £48.08/hour.
This calculation assumes no overtime and no paid time off being worked through. Adjusting for actual working hours gives a more realistic effective rate — particularly for salaried employees who regularly work beyond contracted hours.
UK data consistently shows that salaried employees work an average of 7–8 hours of unpaid overtime per week. For a person earning £40,000 nominally working 40 hours but actually working 47 hours, the effective hourly rate falls from £19.23 to £16.38 — an effective pay cut of nearly 15%. The salary-to-hourly calculator makes this visible in a way that the annual figure obscures.
When comparing a salaried role with an equivalent contract rate, a common guideline is that the contractor rate needs to be 1.5–2× the equivalent employee salary to account for self-employment tax, no paid holiday, no sick pay, no pension contributions, gaps between contracts, and the administrative overhead of running a limited company or working through an umbrella company.
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