What you actually earn an hour

Annual pay divided by contracted hours is the number you quote yourself. Annual pay divided by every hour the job costs is the number you live on. This works out the second one.

Nothing is stored and nothing is sent. The arithmetic happens in your browser and the page forgets it when you close the tab.

What you are paid a year, before taxContracted hours a weekWorking weeks a year

Now the hours nobody counts

Per week, honestly. Estimating low here only flatters the number.

Unpaid hours beyond your contracted week
Evenings, weekends, the hour before everyone else logs on.
hours
Commuting
Door to door, both ways. It is time the job costs you.
hours
Admin you would not do if nobody paid you
Timesheets, expenses, status updates, tool wrangling.
hours
Work outside what you agreed to do
Scope creep, favours, the thing that was meant to be quick.
hours
Time you need to recover from it
The Sunday you cannot use, the evening that is gone before it starts.
hours

Fill in pay, contracted hours and working weeks to see a result.

Why the gap matters more than the rate

A raise moves the top of the fraction. Most of what separates the two numbers is at the bottom, and the hours down there have different causes that need different fixes. Commuting is a location decision. Scope creep is a contract problem. Admin is usually somebody else’s job that quietly became yours. Treating them as one thing called “being busy” is why they never get solved.

The same arithmetic is what makes a rate defensible. What you charge tracks what breaks if the work is not done and how many people could do it — never how long it took you. See what to charge and how to raise it.

The Real Hourly Rate Kit — the calculator above with a workbook that takes each cause separately: how to find your true numbers, what a bad result in each row means, and what actually fixes it. $29.

See the kit