⏱️ What are you really paid an hour?
← Curious CalculatorsA job pays for a number of hours and takes more of them than it pays for — the overtime nobody counts, the lunch at the desk, the travel at both ends of the day. Put in what you are paid and the hours the job costs you, and see the three rates: the one on the payslip, the one every hour works out to, and the one that is really yours.
The rate
The same pay at other hours
| Hours the job takes | The real rate | Hours a year | Extra paid weeks |
|---|
It is a division, not a judgement of the job. The pay is whatever you put in: if it is what reaches your account, every rate here is a take-home rate, and the gap between what you earn and what you keep stays invisible. The hours are the hours you say they are, because nobody else can know them. Everything is worked on a normal week, and a year is taken as fifty-two of those weeks, so leave, public holidays and a week of illness sit outside the arithmetic. Nothing here is advice about a job, a career or a contract.
Why the payslip rate is not the rate
A job is priced in hours and paid in money, and the two rarely line up. The overtime nobody claims, the lunch at the desk, the email answered on the sofa, the travel at both ends of the day: none of it is on a payslip, and all of it is time the job has taken. Divide the pay by that whole figure and the number that comes out compares properly with anything else you might do with the hours.
None of this is an argument that the job is bad. It is the arithmetic that makes a comparison honest: two jobs on the same advertised rate are not the same rate if one is a forty-minute drive away and the other is upstairs, or if one expects the laptop open at nine in the evening. Put both through this page and the difference shows up as a number instead of a feeling.
How it's worked out
Three divisions, all of them the same pay over a different amount of time:
on the paid hours = the pay ÷ the hours the contract pays for
every hour it takes = the pay ÷ (hours worked + travelling)
the real rate = (the pay − what the job costs) ÷ (hours worked + travelling)
- The pay is turned into a week first: a month is a twelfth of a year, so a month's pay is multiplied by 12 and divided by 52, and a year's pay is divided by 52. Pay every two weeks is halved.
- The hours are three separate figures on purpose — paid, actually worked, and travelling — because they are three different things, and the page wants you to see which one is doing the damage.
- What the job costs comes off the pay before the division, because it is money the job took and money you would not otherwise have spent.
- A year is fifty-two of the same week. That is an approximation and it is labelled as one: real years have leave in them, and a week of illness is not a normal week either.
- The table at 40, 45, 50, 55 and 60 hours is the same division five times, so the cost of an extra hour a day can be seen without typing it in five times.
Where the idea comes from
Calling this the "real" rate is not this site's phrasing. The idea of working out an hourly wage that includes everything a job costs in time and money comes from the personal-finance classic Your Money or Your Life, by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, first published in 1992 and still telling people to do this sum. Its argument was that money and life energy are the same thing measured differently, and that a rate which ignores the hours a job eats is a rate that flatters the job.
The one choice the book and this page both leave to the reader is the travelling. Counting the commute is the stricter reading and the one the book takes; leaving it out is defensible too, since nobody is working on the train unless they are. The page shows both, because the counting belongs to whoever is doing it.
Where these numbers come from
- The idea, and the counting of job-related hours and costs, comes from Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin. This page's version of it is set out above: three divisions, with nothing hidden in them.
- The conversion of a month, two weeks and a year into a week is the ordinary one — 52 weeks, 26 two-week periods and 12 months in a year — and the page says so rather than leaving it in the code.
- Everything else is your own two figures, the pay and the hours. There is no benchmark here, no average wage and no data from any country: dividing one number by another does not need to know where you work.
None of it is advice. The page cannot know whether a job is worth its hours — only the person doing it can — and it has no opinion about asking for more, working less, or leaving.
Frequently asked questions
Should the travelling really count?
It is the one judgement call on the page, and both answers are defensible. Counting it is the stricter reading: those hours are not yours, you would not be on that train for any other reason, and a job an hour away costs ten hours a week that a job upstairs does not. Leaving it out gives the rate for the hours you are awake and at work. Put 0 in the box to see that version, and the real figure back to see this one.
Take-home pay, or pay before tax?
Put in what actually reaches you and every rate on the page is a take-home rate, which is the one that compares with money you spend. Put in the figure before tax and you get the rates an advertisement quotes. Whichever you choose, use the same kind in the box and read the answer as that kind of money — the page cannot tell the difference, and cannot convert between the two.
Should I count the hours I spend thinking about work?
That is your call, and the box takes whatever you decide. The strict version of this idea counts nearly everything a job takes — the travel, the clothes, the evenings — but arithmetic cannot police it, and an hour spent worrying about tomorrow is hard to write down honestly. What matters is counting the same way twice, so two jobs or two years can be compared fairly.
What about leave, public holidays and sick days?
The page works on one normal week, fifty-two times over. Paid leave is already inside that: you are paid for the week whether you worked it or not, so the weekly rate does not move. Unpaid leave, a long illness or a slow season with fewer hours sit outside the arithmetic — use a week that represents the job as it usually is, and remember the yearly figures are a multiplication of it.
I am salaried — which hours go in the boxes?
A salary is a fixed amount of money for an unfixed amount of time, which is what this page was built for. Put the paid hours the contract nominally covers — 38, 40, whatever it says — and then the hours you really give it, including the evenings and the weekend mornings. The gap between the first two rates is the answer to what the salary actually pays for.
Does a bonus or regular overtime change any of this?
It can, if it is regular. The page takes one pay figure, so the fairest approach with irregular pay is a week that represents the year — total pay divided by 52, in effect — paired with the hours of a comparable week. A one-off bonus will flatter the rate for the week it lands in, and the yearly figures will know nothing about it.
Does the page have an opinion about the job?
No. It divides one figure by another, and that is the whole of it. There is no advice here about asking for a raise, cutting the commute or looking elsewhere, and nothing here knows whether the work is worth it — plenty of people would take a lower rate for work they love, and the page has nothing to say against that.
More calculators
💡 Cozy's pick
Not sure where to go next? Let Cozy pick one of his favourites for you to try — the lighter end of the site, picked at random, and never the one you are reading.