An hourly rate,
as a real salary

Turning an hourly rate into a salary

The arithmetic is one line: hourly rate, times hours a week, times paid weeks a year. At £18.00 an hour for 37.5 hours over 52 weeks that is £35,100 of gross pay a year. Everything after that is the same PAYE calculation any salaried employee gets, which on 2026/27 rates leaves £28,791.60 a year, or £14.76 for every hour you are paid.

The number that decides the answer is the one an advert rarely states: how many weeks you are paid for. Almost every employee and worker in the UK is paid for 52 weeks, because the law gives them 5.6 weeks of paid holiday and holiday pay is still pay. Use 46.4 weeks only when your hourly rate already has the holiday pay rolled into it, or when you are genuinely self-employed and paid only for the weeks you work.

Each gross figure links to the nearest salary after tax page.

Hourly rate to salary table, 2026/27

The rates people most often convert, each as a full-time salary of 37.5 hours a week over 52 paid weeks, and what is left after income tax and National Insurance in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The first row is the National Living Wage, the legal minimum for workers aged 21 and over. For a 40-hour week, add 6.7 percent to the gross figures, because the year then holds 2,080 paid hours instead of 1,950.

2026/27 rUK rates, no pension or student loan, standard tax code 1257L. Scottish taxpayers pay a little more on the higher rows; switch the region in the calculator to see the exact figure.

The share you keep falls as the rate rises, because more of each year sits above the thresholds. At the National Living Wage you keep about 86 percent of every hour. At £50 an hour the year is well past the higher-rate threshold and you keep about 69 percent.

The hourly rates where your tax changes

Income tax and National Insurance thresholds are annual figures, so an hourly worker crosses each one at a particular rate for a given week. On a 37.5-hour week paid for 52 weeks, the higher rate of 40 percent starts at £25.78 an hour, and the Personal Allowance starts to disappear at £51.28 an hour. Work longer weeks and you reach every threshold at a lower rate.

2026/27 rUK figures. Scotland sets its own income tax bands and rates; National Insurance and student loan thresholds are the same across the UK.

The minimum wage as a salary

From April the National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour for workers aged 21 and over, a rise of 4.1 percent on the year before. Younger workers have lower legal minimums: £10.85 at 18 to 20, and £8.00 under 18 or for an apprentice in their first year. As a full-time salary that puts the floor for an adult at £24,784.50 a year on a 37.5-hour week.

Hold the minimum against the rate you are paid for each hour of work, not a rate with holiday pay folded in. Holiday pay does not count towards the minimum wage, so a rate that includes 12.07 percent rolled-up holiday pay has to be at least £14.24 for the pay underneath it to reach £12.71. The calculator above warns you when a rate falls short, on either basis.

Paid holiday, 52 weeks and rolled-up holiday pay

The right to paid holiday is not a perk of a salaried job. It comes with being a worker, whether you are on a salary, a fixed hourly rate, a zero-hours contract or agency shifts.

That is why 52 weeks is the right default for almost every hourly job. You work about 46.4 weeks and are paid your normal rate for the other 5.6 while you are on leave, so your annual pay is the hourly rate across the whole year. The statutory 5.6 weeks can include bank holidays, and many contracts give more.

The exception is rolled-up holiday pay. For leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024, an employer may add holiday pay to every payslip instead of paying it when you take leave, but only for irregular-hours and part-year workers. The uplift is 12.07 percent, which is 5.6 weeks of leave divided by the 46.4 weeks you work, and the amount has to be shown to you separately. If your rate includes it, choose 46.4 weeks in the calculator: your leave is already paid for inside the rate, so multiplying it by 52 would count the holiday twice.

The two bases agree exactly. £18.00 an hour over 52 weeks is £35,100, and the same pay with holiday rolled in is £20.17 an hour over 46.4 weeks, which comes to the same £35,100. Self-employed contractors have no holiday entitlement at all, and the day rate calculator is the better tool for a rate that has to cover unpaid weeks, equipment and your own tax.

Overtime, shift premiums and variable hours

Overtime is taxed exactly like the rest of your pay. There is no special overtime rate of tax; what changes is how much of the extra money lands above a threshold. Take £18.00 an hour for 37.5 hours, plus 5 hours a week at time and a half (£27.00 an hour). The overtime adds £7,020 of gross pay a year and £5,054.40 of take-home, so each overtime hour leaves you £19.44.

The dip near the bottom of the chart is the Personal Allowance taper. Between £100,000 and £125,140 a year you lose £1 of allowance for every £2 you earn, so an extra hour keeps less there than it does at a higher rate further up. Paying more into a pension through salary sacrifice is the usual way out of that band; the salary sacrifice calculator shows what it saves.

If your hours change from week to week, enter your average. Income tax evens out over the year because your tax code is cumulative, so a heavy week that seems to be taxed hard is usually balanced by the weeks after it. National Insurance is the exception, covered below.

Why your monthly pay is not four weeks of hours

A year has 52 weeks and twelve months, and 52 does not divide by twelve. A month is closer to 4.3 weeks than to four, so multiplying a weekly figure by four understates monthly pay by roughly a week every quarter. Salaried pay solves this by dividing the annual figure by twelve and paying the same amount every month, whatever the calendar did.

That is exactly what the calculator above shows. The monthly gross is the annual figure over twelve, and the monthly take-home is the annual take-home over twelve. If you are paid weekly or four-weekly your actual payslips will vary a little around those numbers while the annual total stays the same.

What the annual figure changes about your tax

PAYE is an annual system worn one payslip at a time. The Personal Allowance of £12,570 and the £50,270 higher-rate threshold are yearly figures that your tax code spreads evenly across the year, which is why a steady salary and an irregular hourly income with the same annual total end up at the same place by April.

National Insurance does not work that way. It is charged on each pay period separately, on earnings above about £242 a week or £1,048 a month, and it is never reconciled at the end of the year. A month of heavy overtime therefore costs more National Insurance than the same money spread evenly, and you do not get it back. That is the one real difference between hourly work and a salary of the same size.

How your rate compares with UK pay

The Office for National Statistics put median hourly pay for full-time employees at £19.67 in April 2025, excluding overtime, up 5.4 percent on a year earlier. Half of full-time employees earn more than that an hour and half earn less. On a 37.5-hour week it works out at about £38,357 a year. The ONS median annual pay for full-time employees was £39,039, a little higher because it includes overtime and longer weeks.

The same survey found employees were paid for 32.8 hours a week on average, part-time staff included, which is why hours matter as much as the rate when you compare two jobs. A higher rate on fewer guaranteed hours can pay less across the year than a lower rate on a full week.

Comparing an hourly job with a salaried offer

• Check the weeks, then the rate. A rate with rolled-up holiday pay looks 12.07 percent better than it is next to a salary, because the salary pays your leave separately. Divide it by 1.1207 before you compare.
• Sick pay and notice. A salary usually carries contractual sick pay and a longer notice period. Hourly work often gets statutory sick pay only.
• Pension. Auto enrolment is assessed on actual earnings each pay period, so variable hours can move you in and out of a scheme across the year. The pension planner shows what a contribution costs you after tax relief.
• Guaranteed hours. An annualised figure assumes the hours are there every week. If they are not, the salary equivalent is the ceiling rather than the expectation.
• Your tax code. Two jobs, or a change of job mid-year, is where a wrong code most often appears. The tax code checker reads yours in a minute.