Salary Calculator

Comparing job offers, negotiating raises, or planning a freelance rate often requires converting pay rates between hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and annual amounts. A $50/hour freelance rate sounds great until you realize it is about $104,000/year at 40 hours/week — comparable to a salaried role with benefits at the same level. Conversely, an $80,000/year salary works out to roughly $38/hour at standard 40-hour weeks.

Utilify converts any input pay frequency to all the others, adjustable for your actual working hours per week and weeks per year. The defaults (40 hours, 52 weeks) describe full-time year-round employment; adjust them down for part-time, contract work with unpaid time off, or seasonal work. Note: these are gross (pre-tax) conversions. Actual take-home depends on your jurisdiction, tax bracket, deductions, and filing status — for those numbers consult a country-specific paycheck calculator.

The annual figure comes from a straightforward chain: hourly rate × hours per week × weeks per year. That is why the assumptions matter so much. The standard 2,080 hours a year (40 × 52) assumes you are paid for every week, including vacation; a contractor who takes four unpaid weeks effectively works 48 weeks, and using 52 would overstate their annual income by roughly 8%. Setting the schedule to match reality is what makes the comparison trustworthy.

The most important use of this tool is comparing a salaried offer against freelance or contract work on equal footing — and the headline rate hides a lot. A salaried job typically bundles in health insurance, paid time off, employer retirement matching, and the employer's share of payroll taxes, none of which a freelancer receives. As a rough rule, an independent rate often needs to be 1.3 to 1.5 times an equivalent employee wage just to break even once you account for self-employment tax, benefits you now buy yourself, and unpaid downtime between projects.

Use the gross conversions here as the apples-to-apples starting point, then layer in taxes and benefits for your situation. Knowing that "$95,000 salaried" and "$60/hour contract" are roughly comparable before benefits is exactly the clarity that makes a negotiation or a career decision easier.