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Put an hourly offer next to a salary offer — including overtime eligibility — and see estimated annual gross and take-home.
Last updated 3 October 2026
Estimates only — not tax, payroll, or financial advice. This is a simplified educational calculator (2026-ish federal brackets + standard deduction, employee FICA, optional flat state tax). It is not IRS Publication 15-T withholding, a substitute for your W-4, or a tax return. Real paystubs vary with credits, benefits, local taxes, additional Medicare tax, and your employer’s payroll system. Confirm numbers with a qualified tax or payroll professional.
Take a real pair of offers: $30.00 an hour, or $70,000 a year. Same work, same employer, same forty-hour week on paper. Run both through the estimate above as a single filer with no deductions and the salary looks better by a clear margin — $58,075 a year in the bank against $52,318, and $27.92 an hour against $25.15.
Now change one thing. Make the job a fifty-hour week, which is what it actually is.
The hourly offer is now $11,115 a year ahead, and the gap per hour has gone from $2.77 behind to $4.27 in front. Nothing about either offer changed. The only thing that moved is who has to be paid for the fiftieth hour, and that is not a negotiating question. It is a legal classification with a three-part test behind it.
Overtime entitlement under the Fair Labor Standards Act is the default. An employee is entitled to “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” unless an exemption applies, and the main exemption — executive, administrative and professional, the one almost every office job argues about — has three requirements that must all be met at once.
Two things follow that most comparison pages never mention. The first is that clearing $684 a week does not make anyone exempt; it only makes an exemption possible. The second is the reverse, and it is the one that costs money: a salaried employee who does not meet the duties test is non-exempt and is owed time and a half above forty hours, salary or no salary. If that describes you, the salary offer in this comparison is being modelled wrongly, because the tool treats the salary side as pay that does not move with hours.
$35,568 is the annual figure the salary level test names. Spread over a forty-hour year it is $17.10 an hour. Spread over fifty-hour weeks it is $13.68 an hour, and the Act asks nothing further, because an exempt employee's pay does not respond to hours at all. For scale, the federal minimum wage is “$7.25 per hour effective July 24, 2009”, so the exempt floor at fifty hours a week sits a little under twice the minimum.
That is the structural asymmetry between the two offers in front of you. On the hourly side, hours are an input and pay is an output. On the salary side, pay is fixed and hours are the variable — and the variable is set by someone who is not you.
The sticker figures in a job advert are annual gross. The number that decides whether you accept is net per hour worked, and getting there needs an honest hours count on both sides.
The fields above let you say it. Hourly hours / week and OT hours / week split the hourly schedule; Salary extra hours / week (unpaid) adds hours to the salaried side without adding pay, which is the exempt-employee case. Four things to know about how that is treated.
The hourly side does not split your hours at forty for you. Enter 50 in Hourly hours / week and all fifty are paid at straight time, giving $78,000 a year and $24.50 an hour net. Enter 40 and 10 and the ten are paid at $45.00, giving $85,800 and $26.61. The $7,800 difference is the overtime premium, and it only appears if you put the overtime hours in the overtime field. The companion hourly to salary calculator splits at forty automatically; this page does not, because here the split is the thing being compared.
Unticking OT-eligible removes the premium, not the hours. If you put 10 hours in the overtime field and then say the job is not eligible, the ten hours stay in the hours-per-year denominator and only the premium goes, so the card reports a 2,600-hour year and $20.12 an hour net. Until 3 October 2026 it dropped the hours as well, reported a 2,080-hour year and $25.15, and that reversed the comparison, because the salaried offer at fifty hours is $22.34. Be clear about what the unticked box describes, though: a non-exempt employee must be paid for every hour worked, and at time and a half above forty, so ten hourly hours that go unpaid, or are paid without the premium, are not a lawful arrangement in the first place. If you are simply paid straight time for fifty hours, enter 50 and 0, which gives $78,000 a year and $24.50 an hour net.
The salaried side has its own contract week. Salaried hours / week defaults to forty and is the week the salary is meant to cover; the hours-per-year figure on that card is that number plus whatever you entered as unpaid extra, times your paid weeks. Set it to 37.5 and $70,000 reads $29.78 an hour over 1,950 hours rather than $27.92 over 2,080; set it to 45 and the same salary reads $24.82 over 2,340. Until 3 October 2026 there was no such field: the week was fixed at forty, so the card understated a 37.5-hour offer by 6.7% and said nothing about having assumed anything.
Paid weeks cut the hourly side only. Drop Paid weeks / year to 48 and the hourly annual gross falls by four weeks of pay, because an hourly employee is paid for hours worked. The salary does not move, which is correct for exempt pay, but the salaried hours count falls too — so four unpaid weeks make the salaried offer look better per hour, which is arguably true and definitely worth noticing.
A workweek is “a fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 hours — seven consecutive 24-hour periods”, and the Department of Labor shuts the obvious door immediately afterwards: “Averaging of hours over two or more weeks is not permitted.”
So a fortnight of sixty hours then twenty hours is not two forty-hour weeks. It is twenty overtime hours, even though the biweekly cheque covers eighty hours in total. At a $30.00 rate the fortnight is worth $2,700, not the $2,400 that eighty straight-time hours would pay, so an employer who averages the two weeks has underpaid by $300. This matters most for jobs with a seasonal or project shape, where the same annual hours arrive in a far lumpier pattern — and this page's single weekly figure cannot express lumpiness. Enter your typical week and treat the output as a typical year.
Three further facts worth having before you compare. The Act “does not require overtime pay for work on Saturdays, Sundays, holidays, or regular days of rest, as such”, so weekend work carries no automatic premium. “There is no limit in the Act on the number of hours employees aged 16 and older may work in any workweek”, so a fifty-hour expectation is lawful on both sides of this comparison. And the FLSA “does not require payment for time not worked, such as vacations, sick leave or federal or other holidays” — which is the single biggest thing missing from an hourly offer and silently present in a salaried one, because an exempt salary keeps arriving during a week you did not work.
One more, and it is the trap in the 1.5 multiplier: the premium is one and a half times your regular rate, not your hourly rate. Those coincide only when the hourly rate is the whole of your pay. Nondiscretionary bonuses and shift differentials belong in the regular rate and push the overtime hour above $45.00. The overtime pay calculator is the page that works that through.
State law. The federal rule is weekly over forty. It is a floor, and a state may require more, including daily overtime thresholds. None of that is modelled here.
Benefits, which are frequently the real difference. Employer health premiums, retirement matching, bonus eligibility and paid leave are not in either column. A salaried offer that is $11,115 behind on net pay can still be ahead once an employer-paid health premium and a retirement match are counted, and this page will never show you that.
Withholding against actual tax. Both columns are a flat annual sketch, not an employer's per-period withholding under IRS Publication 15-T. Real overtime and bonus cheques can be withheld at noticeably different rates in the week they arrive without changing the tax you owe for the year.
State income tax. The state field is a single flat percentage applied to everything, which no state actually does. Brackets, state-specific deductions, local and county taxes, and the states that do not tax wage income at all are every one of them outside it.
Your actual Form W-4. Dependents, a second household income, extra withholding and the Step 2 checkbox all move the federal figure. The W-4 withholding estimator is the page that handles those.
Everything non-financial. Whether your time is your own, whether unpaid hours are expected, whether the schedule is predictable. The hourly column is the one that makes extra hours visible as money. That visibility is itself worth something, and it does not appear in either total.
Figures on this page were read against the sources above on 2 October 2026 and the worked examples were run through the calculator at the top of the page. Nothing you type leaves your browser. More: the rest of the PaystubKit calculators.
At forty hours a week, no: $30.00 an hour is $62,400 gross and about $52,318 a year net, against $58,075 net on the salary. At fifty hours it reverses, because ten overtime hours a week at $45.00 take the hourly offer to $85,800 gross and about $69,190 net, $11,115 ahead. The whole answer turns on whether the hourly job is overtime-eligible and the salaried one is exempt.
All three of the Department of Labor's tests, at once: pay on a salary basis not reducible for variations in quality or quantity of work, at least $684 a week ($35,568 a year), and job duties that fit the executive, administrative or professional definitions. Job titles decide nothing. Hourly pay fails the salary-basis test, which is why an hourly job is normally overtime-eligible even when it annualizes above an exempt salary.
Yes. Salary alone proves nothing; the exemption needs the salary level and the duties test too. A salaried employee below $684 a week, or above it but without qualifying duties, is non-exempt and owed time and a half above forty hours in a workweek.
If overtime is paid, enter 40 in hourly hours and 10 in OT hours: that is $85,800 a year at a $30.00 rate. If it is not paid, enter all 50 in hourly hours and leave OT at zero, which gives $78,000 and $24.50 an hour net. Unticking the OT-eligible box with 10 hours in the overtime field removes those hours from the comparison entirely rather than paying them at straight time.
Two ways, and they mean different things. Salaried hours / week is the contract week, and it defaults to forty: set it to 37.5 and $70,000 becomes $29.78 an hour rather than $27.92, over 1,950 hours instead of 2,080. Salary extra hours / week is unpaid time on top, which leaves the gross alone and adds to the denominator: $70,000 over fifty-hour weeks is $22.34 an hour. Until 3 October 2026 the contract week was fixed at forty with no way to change it, so the per-hour figure was wrong for anyone not on a forty-hour contract and the page did not say it had assumed one.
$684 a week, or $35,568 a year, under the Department of Labor's current published threshold. Over fifty-hour weeks that works out at $13.68 an hour, and the Act requires nothing more, because exempt pay does not respond to hours.