UK Salary to Hourly Rate Calculator

Job adverts, pay rise conversations and comparisons between roles often come down to a simple question: what does this salary actually work out to per hour? This calculator converts a UK annual salary into a gross and net hourly rate, taking into account your actual working hours, holiday entitlement and estimated sick days, so you can compare pay more meaningfully across different jobs or contract types.

How to use the salary to hourly calculator

Enter your annual salary, the hours you work each week, and the number of weeks you work a year, which defaults to 52 since most full-time salaries are paid across the whole year including paid holiday. Then enter your holiday entitlement in days, defaulting to 28, the standard statutory minimum for a full-time UK worker including bank holidays, and an estimate of sick days you expect to take. The calculator returns your gross hourly rate, your net hourly rate after tax, and a separate rate based only on the days you actually work.

How the calculation works

Your gross hourly rate is simply your annual salary divided by your total contracted hours in a year, hours per week multiplied by weeks per year. For your net hourly rate, the calculator first works out your take-home pay using standard England, Wales and Northern Ireland Income Tax bands and employee National Insurance, the same underlying logic as our take-home pay calculator, then divides that net figure by the same total annual hours.

For the working-days-only figure, the calculator subtracts your holiday days and estimated sick days from your total working days in the year, then converts the remaining working days into hours using your stated daily hours. Dividing your net annual pay by this smaller number of actual working hours gives a higher rate, since it reflects that you are still paid for holiday and sick days without physically working them.

Worked example

Take a worker on a £32,000 annual salary, working 37.5 hours a week for all 52 weeks of the year, with 28 days holiday and an estimated 4 sick days.

Total annual hours come to 37.5 × 52 = 1,950 hours, giving a gross hourly rate of £32,000 ÷ 1,950 = £16.41 an hour. After estimated Income Tax of around £3,886 and National Insurance of around £1,554, take-home pay comes to around £26,560 a year, giving a net hourly rate of about £13.62.

Now subtracting the 28 holiday days and 4 sick days from the 260 working days in a 52-week year (5 days a week) leaves 228 actual working days, or 1,710 actual working hours at 7.5 hours a day. Dividing the same £26,560 net pay by this smaller number of hours gives a working-days-only net rate of around £15.53, noticeably higher than the £13.62 figure that spreads pay across every contracted hour including paid leave.

Comparing your rate to the National Living Wage

The National Living Wage sets the legal minimum hourly rate for workers aged 21 and over. Comparing your gross hourly rate against it gives a quick sanity check, particularly useful for part-time roles, zero-hours contracts, or when comparing a salaried offer against an hourly-paid alternative. Our National Insurance calculator and Income Tax calculator can help you dig further into exactly where your deductions come from at any salary level.

Common mistakes when converting salary to an hourly rate

A common mistake is dividing salary by 52 weeks and 40 hours as a rough default, without checking actual contracted hours, which can overstate or understate the real rate considerably for anyone working part-time or unusual hours. Another is comparing a salaried role's gross hourly rate directly against a freelance or contractor day rate, without accounting for the fact that freelancers must cover their own holiday pay, sick pay, pension and business costs out of what looks like a higher headline rate. Our guide to calculating your true freelance hourly rate explains this gap in detail.

It is also easy to forget that a pay rise expressed as a percentage increase to salary does not translate into the same percentage increase in net hourly rate, since tax bands and National Insurance thresholds mean a larger share of a bigger salary is often taxed at a higher rate. Our UK Income Tax 2026/27 guide walks through how the bands work if you want to understand this effect more fully.

Related calculators

For a fuller picture of your take-home pay including pension contributions and student loan repayments, use our take-home pay calculator. To understand your Income Tax and National Insurance separately, try our Income Tax calculator and National Insurance calculator. If you are considering a pay rise, our salary increase calculator shows exactly how much extra you would take home each month.