Hourly to Salary Calculator

Forty hours at $28.50 is $59,280, and there is an assumption buried in it

$28.50 an hour is $1,140 a week at forty hours, $2,280 every two weeks, $4,940 a month and $59,280 a year. That last figure is forty hours multiplied by fifty-two weeks, which is 2,080 hours, and it is the number almost every hourly-to-salary page on the internet uses without saying what it assumes.

$28.50 an hour · 40 hours a week · no overtime

Two assumptions are doing all the work there. The first is that you are paid for all fifty-two weeks. The second is quieter: fifty-two weeks is 364 days, and the calendar year you are actually paid across has 365, or 366 in a leap year. A year is not a whole number of weeks, so 2,080 cannot be the number of working hours in one. It is a convention.

Federal wage law does not supply a better one. The Department of Labor states plainly that “The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) does not define full-time employment or part-time employment”, and separately that the Act “does not require payment for time not worked, such as vacations, sick leave or federal or other holidays”. There is no federal definition of a full working year, and no federal guarantee that any day in it is paid.

Two federal rules, two divisors, and each is right for its own question

Where federal law does pick a number, it picks two different ones, for two different purposes, and the gap between them is real money.

For overtime, the divisor is 52 weeks. The regular-rate regulation at 29 CFR 778.113(b) converts longer pay periods to a weekly figure like this: “A monthly salary is subject to translation to its equivalent weekly wage by multiplying by 12 (the number of months) and dividing by 52 (the number of weeks). A semimonthly salary is translated into its equivalent weekly wage by multiplying by 24 and dividing by 52.” That is the same 52 this page uses, and it is the number that matters if you are owed time and a half.

For federal pay, the divisor is 2,087 hours. Hourly rates for most federal civilian employees are set by statute, and the statute does not say 2,080. The Office of Personnel Management explains why: “A General Accounting Office study published in 1981 demonstrated that over a 28-year period (the period of time it takes for the calendar to repeat itself) there are, on average, 2,087 work hours per calendar year.” The breakdown is worth reading twice, because it shows that 2,080 is not the normal case: “This average results from the fact that there are usually 4 years with 262 workdays (2,096 hours), 17 years with 261 workdays (2,088 hours), and 7 years with 260 workdays (2,080 hours).” Four plus seventeen plus seven is twenty-eight, and the arithmetic OPM publishes is “(2,096 hours*4 years) + (2,088 hours*17 years) + (2,080 hours*7 years) / 28 years = 2,087.143 hours”. So a 2,080-hour year happens seven times in twenty-eight. The most common year is 2,088 hours, which is seventeen times out of twenty-eight.

What that costs, on the same $59,280:

Ten cents an hour, or $199.50 a year, depending which way you ran the conversion. It is about a third of one per cent, which is small enough to ignore in a budget and large enough to explain a disagreement with a recruiter who did the arithmetic the other way round. This page uses 52 weeks, so it gives $59,280.

What this page actually computes

Five lines, in this order. Nothing is withheld and nothing is estimated.

• Weekly is your rate multiplied by the hours you entered. With the overtime box ticked, hours above 40 are paid at 1.5 times the rate instead.
• Annual is the weekly figure multiplied by 52.
• Biweekly is the weekly figure doubled, which is the annual figure divided by 26.
• Semimonthly is the annual figure divided by 24.
• Monthly is the annual figure divided by 12.

The four frequency views are all the same money cut up differently: $2,280.00 × 26, $2,470.00 × 24 and $4,940.00 × 12 all come back to $59,280.00. They agree because they are all derived from one 52-week year rather than from a calendar. Where they stop agreeing is the calendar itself, and that is a separate problem with its own page: in some years a biweekly payroll issues twenty-seven cheques rather than twenty-six, and the biweekly paycheck calculator works through what that does to the money.

The overtime box, and the three things it does not know

Ticking the box pays hours above 40 at one and a half times the rate, which is what the Act requires: “employees covered by the Act must receive overtime pay for hours worked over 40 in a workweek at a rate not less than time and one-half their regular rates of pay”. At $28.50 that makes the forty-first hour worth $42.75, and ten overtime hours a week turn $59,280 into $81,510 a year.

Three limits on that, all of them real.

It is a workweek rule, and this page has one week. The Department of Labor defines the workweek as “a fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 hours — seven consecutive 24-hour periods”, and then closes the obvious loophole: “Averaging of hours over two or more weeks is not permitted.” Fifty hours one week and thirty the next is ten overtime hours under the Act, not zero, even though the fortnight averages forty. A single hours-per-week field cannot say that. Put your typical week in and read the result as a typical year.

The multiplier applies to your regular rate, not your hourly rate. Those are the same number only if your hourly rate is all you are paid. Nondiscretionary bonuses and shift differentials belong in the regular rate, which raises the overtime premium above $42.75; the overtime pay calculator is the page that works through that.

There is no ceiling on the hours. The same fact sheet states that “There is no limit in the Act on the number of hours employees aged 16 and older may work in any workweek”, and the Act “does not require overtime pay for work on Saturdays, Sundays, holidays, or regular days of rest, as such”. Enter 80 hours and the page will annualize it without complaint: forty straight plus forty at $42.75 is $2,850 a week, $148,200 a year. That is arithmetic, not endorsement.

Four situations where 2,080 is the wrong number for you

A 37.5-hour week. Thirty-seven and a half hours over 52 weeks is 1,950 hours, which at $28.50 is $55,575 — $3,705 below the forty-hour figure. The hours field steps in quarter hours for exactly this reason. Do not enter 40 and mentally discount it.

Unpaid closure days. Because the FLSA does not require payment for holidays, an hourly employee whose workplace shuts for ten unpaid days loses 80 hours of pay. At $28.50 that is $2,280, so the honest annual figure is $57,000 rather than $59,280. There is no field for this, so take it off by hand or enter 38.5 hours a week instead of 40, which lands within $60 of it.

You are salaried, and the hours are not the point. This matters more than it looks. The salary-basis test in the Department of Labor's regulations describes exempt pay as a predetermined amount “not subject to reduction because of variations in quality or quantity of work”. A salaried exempt employee on $59,280 is paid that whether the year contained 2,080 working hours or 1,950 or 2,200. An hourly employee reaches $59,280 only by actually working 2,080 hours. The two offers can print the same number and describe different jobs, which is what the hourly vs salary comparison exists for.

You are not on the payroll all year. A rate that annualizes to $59,280 pays $29,640 if you start in July. Seasonal and contract work breaks the 52 in the formula before anything else does.

Going the other way: salary to an hourly rate

Three divisors, three answers, and which one is correct depends entirely on why you are asking.

If you want the figure a recruiter will recognise, divide by 2,080. If you are a federal employee, the statute decides for you and the divisor is 2,087. And if the question is what your overtime hour is worth, neither applies, because the regulation uses a third method. 29 CFR 778.113(a) says the regular hourly rate “is computed by dividing the salary by the number of hours which the salary is intended to compensate”, and then gives an example sharp enough to be worth quoting whole:

“If an employee is hired at a salary of $350 and if it is understood that this salary is compensation for a regular workweek of 35 hours, the employee's regular rate of pay is $350 divided by 35 hours, or $10 an hour, and when the employee works overtime the employee is entitled to receive $10 for each of the first 40 hours and $15 (one and one-half times $10) for each hour thereafter.”

Read the last clause slowly. The divisor is 35, not 40, because 35 is what the salary was for. But hours 36 through 40 are still paid at straight time, because the overtime threshold is 40 regardless of what the salary covered. The same regulation gives a second worked example on the monthly side: “The regular rate of an employee who is paid a regular monthly salary of $1,560, or a regular semimonthly salary of $780 for 40 hours a week, is thus found to be $9 per hour.” That is $1,560 × 12 ÷ 52 ÷ 40, and it is the arithmetic to use if someone quotes you a monthly figure.

What this page does not know

Nothing here is take-home. Every figure above is gross. Social Security at 6.2% and Medicare at 1.45% come off nearly every dollar of wages before any income tax at all, which on $59,280 is $4,534.92 for the year on its own. Federal income tax, your state's income tax and anything your employer deducts for benefits all come after that. The paycheck calculator is the page for net.

It applies the federal overtime rule and no other. Overtime law is a floor, not a ceiling, and a state may require more than the federal weekly rule — a daily threshold, for instance. This page does not model any of it.

It does not know whether you are entitled to overtime at all. That turns on a three-part test with a dollar threshold in it, and the box on this page is a toggle you set, not a determination.

It assumes 52 paid weeks and a steady week. Unpaid leave, part-year employment, a varying schedule and the 27-payday calendar are all outside it.

It does not use the 2,087-hour divisor. If you are reconciling against a federal pay table, expect this page to read high by about a third of a per cent.

Sources

• U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Computing Hourly Rates of Pay Using the 2,087-Hour Divisor — the statutory divisor under 5 U.S.C. 5504(b), the 1981 General Accounting Office study behind it, and the 4 / 17 / 7 split of 2,096, 2,088 and 2,080-hour years over the 28-year calendar cycle.
• 29 CFR 778.113, Salaried employees — general — the regular rate is the salary divided by the hours it was intended to compensate; the $350 / 35-hour and $1,560 monthly worked examples; and the multiply-by-12-divide-by-52 and multiply-by-24-divide-by-52 conversions.
• U.S. Department of Labor, Fact Sheet #23: Overtime Pay Requirements of the FLSA — time and one-half above 40 hours in a workweek, the 168-hour definition of a workweek, the ban on averaging across weeks, the absence of any cap on hours for employees 16 and over, and that weekends and holidays carry no premium of themselves.
• U.S. Department of Labor, Vacation Leave — the FLSA requires no payment for time not worked, including holidays.
• U.S. Department of Labor, Full-Time Employment — the FLSA defines neither full-time nor part-time employment.
• U.S. Department of Labor, Fact Sheet #17A: Exemption for Executive, Administrative, Professional, Computer and Outside Sales Employees — the salary-basis test and the predetermined amount not reducible for variations in quality or quantity of work.
• IRS Publication 15 (Circular E), Employer's Tax Guide — the 6.2% Social Security and 1.45% Medicare employee rates for 2026.

Every figure on this page was read against the sources above on 2 October 2026. The calculator runs in your browser and nothing you type is sent anywhere. More: the rest of the PaystubKit calculators.