What $30 an hour really earns in a year
You see a job posted at $30 an hour. Quick, what's that a year? The internet's favorite shortcut says multiply by 2,000 and add three zeros: $60,000. The standard answer is actually $62,400. And your real number might be neither. Here's why the shortcut lies.
Annual salary from an hourly rate is simple arithmetic with one critical variable: hours worked. The full-time standard is 40 hours a week times 52 weeks, or 2,080 hours a year. At $30 an hour, that's $62,400. But almost nobody works exactly 2,080 paid hours, and the gaps move the number more than people expect.
Hours per week change everything. Drop from 40 to 35 hours and that same $30 rate yields $54,600, a $7,800 difference from one assumption. Work 45 hours with overtime at time-and-a-half, and the math climbs past $74,000. The rate on the posting is only half the story; the schedule is the other half.
Paid time off cuts the other direction, quietly. If you're an hourly worker who isn't paid for vacation, every unpaid week shrinks your real annual pay. Take two unpaid weeks and you work 50 weeks, not 52, dropping $62,400 to $60,000. That's the hidden cost salaried workers don't face: a salaried employee earning $62,400 still gets paid during their two-week vacation, while the hourly worker at the same rate earns $2,400 less for the same lifestyle. This converter lets you set weeks worked so the number reflects your reality, not a textbook assumption.
It runs in reverse too, which matters when you're comparing a salaried offer against your hourly work. Offered a $70,000 salary? At 2,080 hours that's $33.65 an hour. Now you can compare it apples to apples against your current $30 rate and see the real gap. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the majority of American workers are paid hourly, so for most people, translating between the two is the single most useful pay calculation there is.