Hourly rate to salary calculator

£14.50 an hour over a 37.5-hour week, paid for 52 weeks, is £28,275 a year before tax. The same money quoted as a contractor day rate — 5 days across 46 worked weeks — is £122.93 a day, because nobody pays you for the weeks you are not working.

How this is worked out

An hourly rate becomes a year by multiplying it by the hours in your week and then by the weeks you are paid; a salary becomes an hourly rate by dividing by the same two. A day rate is the same shape with days instead of hours, but multiplied by the weeks you expect to work rather than the weeks in a year, because unworked weeks are unpaid. Everything else follows from the annual figure: a month is a twelfth of it, and a week is the year divided by the weeks you are paid — which is why the paid and worked figures are asked for separately rather than assumed to be the same.

£14.50 an hour over a 37.5-hour week, and what day rate would match it

1. £14.50 × 37.5 hours = £543.75 for a week.
2. £543.75 × 52 paid weeks = £28,275 a year.
3. To quote that as a day rate you divide by the days you would actually work: 5 days × 46 weeks = 230 days.
4. £28,275 ÷ 230 = £122.93 a day — noticeably more than a fifth of the weekly figure, because the unworked weeks have to be covered by the ones you do work.

Weeks paid and weeks worked are separate boxes on purpose. Every calculator that offers one box has to guess, and the usual guess — 52 — turns a day rate into an annual figure a contractor will never see.

Why there is nothing to cite here

This is unit conversion. There is no rate to look up, nothing that changes in April, and no jurisdiction involved — the only judgement is how many weeks you are paid and expect to work, and those are yours to state rather than ours to assume. Tax is a different matter entirely, which is why the take-home pay calculator is a separate page that cites HMRC and carries a date.

What catches people out

• Multiplying a contractor day rate by 52 weeks is the most expensive mistake on this page. A contractor is not paid for the weeks they do not work — no holiday, no bank holidays, no sick pay — so a £450 day rate is not £117,000 a year. At a realistic 46 worked weeks it is £103,500, and the £13,500 difference is money nobody ever receives. That is why weeks worked and weeks paid are separate boxes here.
• Weeks in a year is a convention rather than a fact. Most UK payrolls divide a salary by 52; 365 ÷ 7 gives 52.143, and some employers use that instead. The gap is about a third of a per cent — roughly £130 a year on £40,000 — which is small enough to look like a bug and large enough to notice, so this page states which figure it used.
• An advertised hourly rate may already include holiday pay rolled into it. Almost all workers are entitled to 5.6 weeks of paid holiday a year, and where that is paid as a supplement on each hour rather than as paid time off, the headline rate is higher than the underlying one. Converting such a rate to an annual salary and then expecting paid holiday on top counts it twice.
• A salary divided by contracted hours is not what you earn an hour if you routinely work more than them. Unpaid overtime does not change the salary, so it quietly lowers the real hourly rate — and it is the figure worth working out before comparing a salaried job with an hourly one.
• Comparing a day rate with a salary on money alone leaves out everything an employer otherwise provides: pension contributions, sick pay, notice, redundancy rights and paid leave. The arithmetic here is a floor for the comparison, not the comparison itself.

Questions

How do I turn an hourly rate into an annual salary?

Multiply the hourly rate by the hours you work in a week, then by the number of weeks a year you are paid. At £14.50 an hour over 37.5 hours and 52 weeks that is £28,275.

Going the other way, divide the salary by the same two numbers. The result should match your payslip to within a penny or two of rounding.

Why does another calculator give me a different number?

Almost always because it used a different number of weeks. 52 is the common payroll convention and 52.143 is 365 divided by 7; the two disagree by about a third of a per cent.

The other common cause is a day-rate conversion that assumed 52 worked weeks. That one is not a rounding difference — it inflates a contractor's annual figure by more than a tenth.

What day rate matches a £60,000 salary?

Across five days and 44 worked weeks — allowing for holiday and a little downtime — £60,000 works out at about £273 a day.

Treat that as a floor rather than an equivalent. It replaces the salary and nothing else: not the employer pension contribution, not sick pay, not notice, not redundancy rights, and not the paid holiday the 44 weeks already assumes you are taking unpaid.

Should I use 52 weeks or 52.143?

Use whatever your employer uses, which is usually 52 and is what this page defaults to. If you are checking a payslip, the figure that reproduces it is the right one.

For a contractor the question does not arise in that form: what matters is not weeks in the year but weeks you expect to be working, which is a different and much smaller number.

Does this tell me what I take home?

No — every figure here is gross, before tax. Income tax and National Insurance have thresholds that do not scale with hours, so take-home pay is not a fixed fraction of gross.

Convert to an annual figure here, then put it through the take-home pay calculator.

If the role is advertised pro rata

Work out the next thing

• Statutory redundancy payWorked out year by year, because the rate depends on the age you were during each year of service rather than your age when the job ends.
• Take-home payGross salary in, every deduction itemised out — income tax band by band, National Insurance, student loan, pension.
• Pay riseWhat a rise or a bonus is actually worth in your bank account, and the marginal rate that decides it.