⏳ How many years of your life does this purchase cost?
Price something in the one thing you can't earn back — the hours, weeks and years you would spend at work to pay for it.
Results
The same price at other pay rates
| Hourly rate | Hours of work | Time of your life |
|---|
What other price tags cost you
| Purchase | Hours of work | Time of your life |
|---|
An estimate, not advice. The hourly rate is the one after tax, because tax and super never reach your pocket. Days assume a five-day week, and working months and years are time at work rather than calendar time: a working year is taken as 48 weeks, which is the year with four weeks of leave taken out of it. Overtime, penalty rates, unpaid breaks, leave loading and the cost of getting to work are all ignored — as are the purchases that earn money back, and the possibility that you actually like your job. Treat it as a thought experiment, not a life sentence.
Why use this calculator?
Prices are quoted in dollars, and a dollar is abstract until you know what it cost you to earn. This calculator translates a price into the working time it takes to pay for it — hours, days, weeks, years — which is the comparison a purchase is really being made against, and the one nobody does in the shop. It works both ways: two hours of work for a good pair of shoes is a different decision from two weeks of work for a phone.
Time, money and where the idea came from
Turning a price into hours is an old habit, and the arithmetic of a working life is worth seeing once:
- “Remember that time is money” is usually credited to Benjamin Franklin, who wrote it in Advice to a Young Tradesman, published in 1748. He popularised the line rather than invented it: it had already appeared in print in 1719, in the newspaper The Free-Thinker.
- The sentiment is older still. Seneca’s De Brevitate Vitae, “On the Shortness of Life”, makes much the same argument about time being the one resource nobody guards carefully, and it was written nearly two thousand years ago.
- A working life is roughly 82,000 hours: 38 hours a week, 48 weeks a year, for 45 years comes to 82,080 hours. That is 9.4 years of full days, a little over a tenth of an 80-year life — which is the figure that makes an hour of your time a sensible unit of price.
How does this calculator work?
The price is divided by your hourly rate after tax — the money that actually reaches your pocket, because the tax and the super never do:
hours of work = price ÷ hourly rate after tax
Everything else follows from those hours and the week you work:
- Working days = hours ÷ (hours per week ÷ 5), on a standard five-day week.
- Working weeks = hours ÷ hours per week.
- A working year is 48 weeks: the calendar year with four weeks of leave taken out of it. Working months = weeks × 12 ÷ 48, and working years = weeks ÷ 48.
- The share of a working year is hours ÷ (hours per week × 48), so a purchase costing a whole year of work comes out at 100% of the bar.
The headline figure is given in the biggest unit that still means something: years and months, then months and weeks, then weeks and days, then hours. One table runs the same price past other pay rates, and another runs your rate past other price tags, with your own figures marked so you can see where you sit on both.
Frequently asked questions
Why is a working year 48 weeks and not 52?
Because almost nobody works all 52 of them. Four weeks of leave comes out, and the arithmetic then describes time at a desk rather than the passage of the calendar. It also makes the numbers rounder: at the figures on this page a working year is 1,824 hours, and a month of it is four weeks of work.
Should I put in my before-tax or after-tax rate?
After tax, always. Tax and super never reach your pocket, so pricing a purchase in before-tax dollars makes it look cheaper than it is — and the difference is not small. Finding your after-tax rate is a matter of dividing your take-home pay for a period by the hours you worked for it, and the Pay Calculator on this site will do the first half of that.
What about the commute, lunches and work clothes?
None of them are counted, and all of them would make the answer worse rather than better: they are real costs of the hours you sell, and leaving them out is the generous reading. Unpaid breaks, leave loading, penalty rates and overtime are ignored for the same reason.
Is this meant to put me off buying things?
No — it is a thought experiment, and it ignores the things a purchase can earn back and the possibility that you like your job. What it is good for is proportion: some things are worth a week of work and some are not worth an hour, and seeing which is which in the same unit is hard to argue with.
Why does the same price come out at different times in the other table?
Because that table changes the pay rate rather than the price, running it from $20 to $100 an hour. It is there for the two useful readings: what the purchase would cost somebody on a different wage, and what a pay rise would do to the price of everything you buy.
Does it include overtime, penalty rates or a second job?
No. It uses one flat hourly rate and the hours you say you work in a week, so a week of overtime would need to go in as an average rate rather than the base one. If your hours change a lot, run it twice with a quiet week and a heavy one.
What does the share button actually send?
The sentence on the result card and a link to this page, and nothing else. The site sends nothing anywhere by itself: the button hands that sentence to your own device's share sheet, or puts it on your clipboard when the device has no share sheet to offer. What you do with it after that is between you and whichever app you picked.