Paycheck & Salary Calculator

A wage is one number wearing seven different hats. The rate you negotiated, the figure on your offer letter, and the amount that appears in your bank account every other Friday are all the same money divided by different counts — and the counts are not obvious, which is why "is $36 an hour good?" and "how much is $75,000 a year biweekly?" are questions people actually type. This calculator holds all seven views at once: type into any card and the other six update. Underneath, everything routes through the annual figure.

The two kinds of pay period

The one genuinely tricky part of converting a wage is that the seven periods are not the same kind of thing, and mixing them up is where most mental arithmetic goes wrong.

Hourly, daily and weekly are rates. They describe how fast you earn while you are working, so they depend on your schedule. At 40 hours a week over 52 weeks there are 2,080 working hours in a year, which is why $75,000 a year is $36.06 an hour. Drop to 25 hours a week over 48 weeks and the same salary would be a very different hourly rate, so the schedule card feeds these three directly.

Biweekly, semimonthly and monthly are calendar pay dates. Your employer issues 26 biweekly paychecks, or 24 semimonthly ones, or 12 monthly ones, and that count is a property of the payroll calendar rather than of how much you worked. So these three always divide the annual figure by 26, 24 and 12 — the numbers printed under each card.

At the default 52 weeks the two readings agree, because 52 weeks is exactly 26 fortnights. They only come apart once you set fewer paid weeks. On $60,000 a year with 48 paid weeks, the weekly figure is $1,250 — what you earn in a week you are actually paid for — while the biweekly figure stays $2,307.69, because the annual salary is still spread across 26 pay dates. Both are right; they answer different questions.

Biweekly is not the same as twice a month. Twenty-six is not twenty-four, so a biweekly paycheck is about 8% smaller than a semimonthly one on the same salary — $2,884.62 versus $3,125.00 at $75,000 a year. It is also why biweekly employees get two "three-paycheck months" a year, which is a budgeting quirk rather than a bonus.

Overtime, and the two hourly rates you have

Once you work overtime you have two hourly rates, and almost every argument about whether a job pays well comes down to confusing them.

Your base rate is what an ordinary hour pays — the number on your contract. Your effective rate (also called the blended rate) is total pay divided by the hours you actually worked, premium hours included. The tool shows the base rate in the hourly card and the effective rate beside the overtime fields, because they answer different questions: the base rate is what you negotiate, the effective rate is what you are really earning per hour of your life.

The arithmetic runs through paid-hour equivalents. Ten overtime hours at time-and-a-half are worth fifteen regular hours of pay, so a 40 + 10 week is paid as 55 hours even though you were there for 50. At a $30 base rate that is $30 × 40 + $45 × 10 = $1,650 a week, or $85,800 a year, and $1,650 ÷ 50 actual hours gives an effective rate of $33.00. Push the same hours to double time and the week is paid as 60 equivalents instead.

Two consequences that surprise people. First, overtime raises the hourly, daily and weekly figures but not the size of a biweekly or monthly paycheck relative to the annual total — those still divide the year by 26 and 12, because an employer does not issue extra paydays for a Saturday shift. Second, if you hold the salary fixed and switch overtime on, the implied base rate falls: $85,800 over a plain 40-hour year is a $41.25 base rate, but over a 40 + 10 year it is only $30.00, since the same money now has to cover more paid-hour equivalents.

The tool takes hours and a multiplier and asserts no legal rule, because there isn't one rule to assert. Federal FLSA overtime is a weekly threshold — time and a half past 40 hours in a workweek — while California and a few other states also use a daily one, over 8 hours in a day and double time past 12. Salaried staff above the exempt threshold may get no overtime at all. So enter the hours you actually work at a premium and the multiplier you actually get, rather than expecting the tool to infer either.

Comparing two offers

A higher salary is not automatically a better job, and the comparison table exists to make the trade explicit. Take a salaried role at $85,000 for a normal 40-hour year against an hourly job at $30 with ten overtime hours a week. The hourly job wins on gross — $85,800 against $85,000, so $800 ahead — and on take-home, by about $563 a year for a single filer with no state tax.

But it costs 2,600 hours a year against 2,080. That is 520 extra hours, or thirteen extra 40-hour weeks, to earn $800 more. Per hour of your life the salaried role pays $40.87 and the hourly one $33.00 — a 24% difference running the opposite way to the headline number. That comparison is the whole reason the table reports hours a year and effective hourly next to the money.

Every column is measured against the first one, which mirrors the calculator above. The baseline is deliberately positional rather than "the best offer", so the reference does not jump around as you type. Filing status, pre-tax contributions and the state rate are shared across all the columns, on the reasoning that you are the same person whichever job you take.

Worked examples

• $25 an hour, full time. 40 hours × 52 weeks = 2,080 hours → $52,000 a year, $1,000 a week, $2,000 every two weeks, $4,333.33 a month.
• $75,000 a year. $36.06 an hour, $288.46 a day, $1,442.31 a week, $2,884.62 every two weeks, $3,125.00 twice a month, $6,250.00 a month.
• $100,000 a year. $48.08 an hour, $1,923.08 a week, $3,846.15 every two weeks, $8,333.33 a month.
• $2,000 every two weeks. × 26 = $52,000 a year, or $25 an hour on a standard schedule — the same job as the first example, seen from the paycheck instead of the rate.
• Part time: $30 an hour, 25 hours a week, 48 paid weeks. 1,200 working hours → $36,000 a year, $750 a week, $3,000 a month.
• Overtime: $30 an hour, 40 + 10 hours at time-and-a-half. Paid as 55 equivalents a week → $1,650 a week, $85,800 a year, and an effective rate of $33.00 across the 50 hours actually worked.
• Overtime at double time: $30 an hour, 40 + 8 hours at 2×. Paid as 56 equivalents → $1,680 a week, $87,360 a year, effective rate $35.00 over 48 hours. Fewer premium hours than the previous example, but more money, because the multiplier is doing the work.
• A modest amount of overtime: $25 an hour, 40 + 5 at time-and-a-half. 47.5 equivalents → $1,187.50 a week, $61,750 a year, effective rate $26.39.

What take-home actually removes

Gross pay is not the number that matters. The estimate below the converter subtracts the four things that come out of a US paycheck before you see it, and shows each separately because they behave differently:

• Federal income tax, charged progressively. Only the income above each threshold is taxed at that threshold's rate, which is why being "pushed into a higher bracket" never reduces your take-home — a raise is always worth having.
• Social Security, 6.2%, charged on the first $184,500 of wages in 2026 and nothing above that. High earners see their paycheck grow slightly partway through the year when they cross it.
• Medicare, 1.45%, on every dollar with no cap at all.
• Additional Medicare, 0.9%, on wages above $200,000 ($250,000 filing jointly). Those two thresholds are written into the statute and are not adjusted for inflation, so they catch more people every year.

On $75,000 as a single filer with no state tax, that is $7,670 of federal income tax, $4,650 of Social Security and $1,087.50 of Medicare — $13,407.50 in total, leaving $61,592.50, or about $5,132.71 a month. The effective rate is 17.9% even though the top bracket touched is 22%, which is the gap between marginal and effective rates in one line.

Filing status moves the number more than most people expect, because it changes both the standard deduction and the width of every bracket. At $120,000 a single filer owes $17,570 in federal income tax; a couple filing jointly on that same $120,000 owes $10,040 — a $7,530 difference, and it drops their marginal rate from 22% to 12%.

Pre-tax contributions come off before federal tax is calculated, so a dollar into a 401(k) costs you less than a dollar of take-home. On $75,000, contributing $10,000 saves $2,050 in federal tax, so take-home falls by $7,950 rather than the full $10,000. Note the saving is not simply 22% of the contribution: it straddles a bracket floor, so $8,500 comes off at 22% and the last $1,500 at 12%.

What this estimate does not do

It is a planning figure, not a payslip, and there are four deliberate simplifications worth knowing about.

It always applies the standard deduction and no credits. If you itemize, or claim the child tax credit, or have dependents, student loan interest, or self-employment income, your real bill differs. It also assumes this job is your only income.

State tax is whatever rate you type. No state tables are baked in, on purpose: there are fifty of them, several are progressive, many have local add-ons, and all of them change — a stale rate presented as authoritative is worse than asking you for one. Nine states levy no wage income tax at all (Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming), so 0 is the right answer there.

FICA is charged on the full gross. In reality, health premiums taken under a section 125 plan are exempt from Social Security and Medicare, while 401(k) deferrals are not. This tool takes one combined pre-tax figure and so cannot tell them apart; charging FICA on everything keeps the estimate on the cautious side.

Withholding is not the same as tax owed. What your employer actually takes out each period is driven by your Form W-4 and the IRS percentage-method tables, which aim to land near your annual liability but rarely hit it exactly — that difference is your refund or your April bill. This tool estimates the liability, not the withholding.

All the 2026 federal figures — the brackets, the standard deductions, and the $184,500 Social Security wage base — come from the IRS inflation-adjustment revenue procedure for that year. Everything runs in your browser; no salary you type is sent anywhere.