How to Figure Out Hourly Wages

Two common ways to measure an employee's income is through an annual salary or through an hourly wage. Different jobs pay in different ways, but employees will often want to have a common wage to compare how much different jobs pay. For example, if you are interviewing an employee who would be paid an annual salary but has been offered an hourly wage job elsewhere, he might ask what the annual salary converts to as an hourly wage.

Things You'll Need

• Calculator

Instructions

1. Estimate the number of hours each week that the employee works. Most workers work 40 hours per week.

2. Multiply the number of weeks per year the employee gets paid each week. Unless the worker is a seasonal employee, use 52 weeks.

3. Multiply the number of hours the employee works each week by the number of weeks per year worked to find the total number of annual hours. For the typical worker, you would multiply 40 hours per week by 52 weeks per year to get a total of 2,080 hours per year.

4. Divide the annual wages paid by the number of hours worked per year to find the employee's hourly wage. Here, if the employee earns $34,000 per year, you would divide $34,000 by 2,080 to get about $16.35 per hour.

References

• Intuit: Hourly Wage Calculation
• Hourly Salaries: Hourly Pay Wage to Salary Conversion Calculator