Hourly wage
Know your hourly rate but not your salary? Work out the annual gross and what actually lands in your pocket after tax, NI, pension and student loan.
Your work
The breakdown
From hourly rate to real money in 2026/27
Employers advertise by the hour, HMRC taxes by the year, and your landlord collects by the month. The gross conversion is easy: rate times hours times paid weeks. What happens after that is where hourly workers get short-changed by rough guesses, because tax bands and NI thresholds are annual, and the share of your rate you keep depends on where the year's total lands.
What £18 an hour actually pays
£18 an hour at 37.5 hours a week, paid all 52 weeks, is £35,100 a year. Income tax takes £4,506, National Insurance £1,802, and you keep £28,792. Spread that back over the same hours and your real rate is £14.76. Roughly speaking, the taxman works the same shifts you do and bills for a fifth of them.
The keep-rate changes as the annual total climbs. Earnings inside the personal allowance are yours in full. Pounds in the basic band keep 72p after tax and NI. Anything over £50,270 keeps 58p, and a student loan takes its slice on top. So a rate rise from £18 to £20 is welcome, but it arrives at 72p in the pound, and your effective hourly rate moves less than the headline one.
Watch the weeks, not just the rate
The paid-weeks box quietly decides everything. Plenty of hourly work pays nothing like 52 weeks: term-time contracts run around 39 to 45, agency work has gaps, zero-hours means zero some weeks. The same £18 rate over 44 paid weeks is £29,700 gross, a different tax position and a much thinner monthly average. If you're weighing a salaried offer against your hourly life, convert both to annual take-home with the take-home pay calculator, check part-time scenarios with the pro-rata calculator, or start from the money you need with the required salary tool.
Common questions
How do I convert an hourly wage to an annual salary?
Multiply your hourly rate by the hours you work each week, then by 52. For example, £15 an hour for a 37.5-hour week is about £29,250 a year before tax. The calculator then takes off Income Tax and National Insurance to show your take-home.
Does this include holiday pay?
Salaried figures assume you are paid across the whole year, including paid leave. If you are paid only for hours actually worked, with no paid holiday, your real annual figure will be lower, so count only the weeks you are actually paid.
What is the minimum wage for 2026/27?
From April 2026 the National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over is £12.71 an hour. Enter your own rate to see what it is worth after Income Tax and National Insurance.
These results are estimates for general information only and are not financial advice. Check every figure yourself and seek appropriate advice from a qualified professional before making any decision. Read the full disclaimer.