Salary & Career Calculators
Your paycheck is more than just a number. Understanding how your compensation breaks down across pay periods, taxes, and benefits helps you negotiate better offers, set competitive freelance rates, and plan your household budget with confidence.
Our salary and career tools cover every angle of compensation planning. Convert between hourly and annual pay, estimate your take-home pay after taxes and deductions, calculate overtime earnings, model the impact of a raise, figure out what to charge as a freelancer, compare cost of living between cities, split tips accurately, and explore how demographic factors influence wages. Whether you are evaluating a new job offer or optimizing your current income, these calculators put the numbers in perspective.
Salary to Hourly Converter
Convert your annual salary to an hourly rate plus daily, weekly, biweekly, and monthly breakdowns.
Hourly to Salary Converter
Convert your hourly wage to an equivalent annual salary and see all pay period breakdowns.
Take-Home Pay Calculator
Estimate your net pay after federal and state taxes, FICA, and deductions are applied.
Overtime Calculator
Calculate overtime pay at 1.5x or 2x rates and see how extra hours affect your paycheck.
Raise Calculator
See how a salary raise or percentage increase affects your annual, monthly, and hourly pay.
Freelance Rate Calculator
Determine the hourly or project rate you need to charge to match a salaried position's total compensation.
Cost of Living Calculator
Compare the cost of living between two cities and see what salary adjustment you would need.
Tip Calculator
Calculate tips for any bill amount, split between multiple people, with customizable tip percentages.
Wage Gap Calculator
Explore earnings differences across demographics and understand the adjusted and unadjusted wage gap.
Reading a pay number correctly
Gross, net and the gap between them
A salary figure is a gross annual number, and it is not what you receive. Between the offer letter and your account sit federal income tax, state and sometimes local income tax, Social Security at 6.2 percent, Medicare at 1.45 percent, and whatever you have elected for retirement, health premiums and other pre-tax deductions. The combined effect commonly removes 25 to 35 percent, so a 90,000 dollar salary lands closer to 5,000 dollars a month than to 7,500. The take-home pay calculator exists to make that gap visible before you plan around a number you will never see.
The order of operations matters when comparing offers. Pre-tax deductions such as traditional 401(k) contributions and health premiums reduce taxable income, so two identical salaries with different benefit structures produce different take-home pay and different tax bills. A slightly lower salary with a strong pre-tax benefit package and an employer match can beat a higher headline number, and the only way to see it is to run both through the same calculation rather than comparing the headline figures.
Converting between hourly and salary without fooling yourself
The standard conversion uses 2,080 hours, which is 40 hours across 52 weeks, so a 75,000 dollar salary is about 36.06 dollars an hour and 30 dollars an hour is about 62,400 dollars a year. The quick mental version is to double the hourly rate and read it as thousands: 30 dollars an hour is roughly 60,000 dollars. That approximation is close enough for a first pass and wrong in one specific way, which is that 2,080 assumes you are paid for every week including the ones you take off.
For salaried employees that assumption holds, because paid time off is already inside the salary. For hourly and contract workers it does not, and using 2,080 overstates annual income by whatever you actually take unpaid. A contractor who takes three weeks off is working 1,960 hours, and the same hourly rate produces about 4.6 percent less than the naive conversion suggests. This is the single most common error when someone moves from a salaried role to contracting and concludes that the rate is equivalent.
Freelance rates are not hourly wages
Converting a salary to a freelance rate by dividing by 2,080 produces a rate that loses money. Three costs land on the freelancer that an employer previously absorbed. The first is self-employment tax: employees split Social Security and Medicare with their employer, while the self-employed pay both halves, 15.3 percent on net earnings up to the Social Security wage base. The second is benefits, which means health insurance, retirement contributions and paid leave now bought at retail out of the same revenue.
The third and least intuitive is unbillable time. Sales, proposals, invoicing, bookkeeping and the gaps between contracts are real hours that no client pays for, and a realistic utilisation rate is 60 to 70 percent rather than 100. Combining the three, the rate that replaces a given salary is usually between 1.5 and 2 times the naive hourly conversion. A 100,000 dollar salary, roughly 48 dollars an hour on paper, generally needs something in the region of 75 to 95 dollars an hour of billed work to leave the freelancer in the same position.
Raises, overtime and cost of living
A raise is worth less than its headline percentage in two ways. The increase is taxed at your marginal rate, not your average rate, so a portion of it is withheld before you see it, and inflation erodes what remains. A 3 percent raise in a year of 3 percent inflation is flat in real terms, which is why the raise calculator reports the after-tax and inflation-adjusted figures rather than the gross increase alone. Knowing the real number is what makes it possible to argue for the right one.
Overtime and geography are the other two levers. Under federal rules, non-exempt employees earn 1.5 times their regular rate beyond 40 hours in a workweek, and the regular rate includes non-discretionary bonuses and shift differentials rather than base pay alone, which is why calculated overtime is often higher than expected. Geography can dwarf both: comparing two offers in different metros without adjusting for housing, tax and everyday costs is comparing numbers that do not mean the same thing, and the cost of living calculator converts them into a common unit before you decide.