Salary to hourly: the honest conversion
Last updated: July 2026
Every salary-to-hourly converter on the internet does the same thing: annual salary divided by 2,080 hours. For an employee comparing two jobs, that is fine. For a freelancer setting a rate, it is the most expensive formula ever typed into a search bar.
In short: salary divided by 2,080 hours works for employees only; a freelancer's realistic billable year is ~1,175 hours, so the honest hourly equivalent is roughly double the naive figure.
The formula is not wrong, but it answers a different question than the one a freelancer should be asking.
What 2,080 actually measures
2,080 is 52 weeks times 40 hours: the standard paid year of a full-time employee. Every one of those hours is paid, including the ones spent on vacation, in meetings, waiting for an answer, or looking out of the window in August. The employee sells their availability, and availability covers everything.
Divide a $42,000 salary by 2,080 and you get $20. That number means: this is what the employer pays per hour of availability.
It does not mean: this is what one hour of this person's work is worth on the open market.
What a freelancer's year actually contains
A freelancer sells finished hours, not availability, and the finished hours are a minority of the year. Take a realistic 25 billable hours per week and five weeks off: 25 × 47 = 1,175 billable hours a year. The other hours still exist, filled with prospecting, admin, negotiations, emails and unpaid thinking, but no invoice comes out of them.
The honest denominator
An employee's paid year is 2,080 hours. A realistic freelance billable year is around 1,175 hours: about 56%. Same annual income, roughly half the hours to carry it, so the honest hourly figure is roughly double the naive one before benefits and costs are even counted.
Check your own denominator
Same package, half the hours
Your billable year is about 56% of the employee's paid year. That is why $20/h on a payslip needs $40/h on an invoice.
Billable Hours
per week as a freelancer (shared)
Weeks Off
per year, unpaid when freelance (shared)
Drag any blue number to adjust (click it to type). Your inputs carry over to the full tool. Access full tool
Set your real weekly billable hours and your real weeks off. The gap between the two bars is personal: a freelancer billing 35 hours a week has a smaller gap and a smaller correction; a consultant billing 15 hours has a bigger one. There is no universal conversion factor, which is exactly why universal converters get it wrong.
The full conversion, in order
Hours are only the first correction. The complete path from salary to honest freelance rate runs: start from take-home plus benefits, add room for freelance tax, add business costs, divide by real billable hours, then add a security premium.
Each step exists because the employee had something the freelancer must now buy: paid downtime, benefits, an employer paying for the office and the tools, and income that arrives even in a bad month.
Skip a step and the missing money does not disappear. It just gets paid by you, quietly, every month.
The naive formula tells you what your availability cost your employer. Your rate must price what your work is worth when you carry everything yourself.
Convert it properly
The full calculator runs every step: package, tax, costs, real hours, premium. Thirty seconds, your numbers.
Run the comparisonFree, no signup. For real.
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