Straight answer: this calculator takes an annual salary as input right now. It doesn’t yet have a dedicated hourly-wage mode with overtime handling. That’s a real gap, not an oversight worth hiding — here’s how to work around it today, and what’s planned.
Converting an hourly wage to an annual estimate
The standard approximation for a full-time role:
Hourly rate × hours per week × 52 weeks = estimated annual salaryFor a typical 40-hour week: hourly rate × 2,080 (40 × 52).
Example: $28/hour at 40 hours/week → $28 × 2,080 = $58,240 estimated annual salary. Plug that number into the calculator’s annual salary field to see estimated federal tax, FICA, and take-home pay — see Gross Pay vs. Net Pay for what happens to that number next.
Where this approximation breaks down
This shortcut assumes exactly 40 hours every single week for 52 weeks — real hourly work rarely matches that precisely:
- Unpaid time off. Unpaid vacation, unpaid leave, or gaps between jobs mean fewer than 52 paid weeks a year. If you know you’ll have, say, 2 unpaid weeks off, use 50 instead of 52 weeks in the formula.
- Overtime. Hours over 40 in a week are typically paid at 1.5× the base rate (federal law, with some state variations). This calculator doesn’t currently model overtime pay — the annual estimate above only reflects straight-time hours.
- Variable schedules. Part-time or fluctuating hours make a single annual estimate less reliable by definition — averaging your actual hours over a few recent pay periods gives a better starting number than assuming a flat 40.
Why annual-salary-only, for now
This calculator’s federal tax and FICA math is built around annual income because that’s what tax brackets themselves are based on — brackets apply to yearly taxable income, not weekly or hourly earnings. Building accurate hourly support means also modeling overtime rules correctly (including state-specific variations), which is real added complexity, not just a different input field. It’s on the roadmap, done properly rather than bolted on.
In the meantime
Use the conversion above to get a reasonable annual estimate, then run it through the Paycheck Calculator the same way a salaried result would work. For most straight 40-hour-a-week roles without significant overtime, this gets you close — just know it’s an approximation layered on top of the calculator’s own Exact/Estimated federal and FICA math, not itself labeled Exact.