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A $95k salary is not a $46/hour freelance gig — the employer was quietly paying your benefits, half your payroll tax, and your time off. This converts a salary into the rate that truly matches it, and converts a rate back into the salary it's worth.
Nothing you type leaves your browser. This isn't tax or legal advice — talk to an accountant about your situation.
The naïve conversion — divide a salary by 2,080 hours, or multiply a rate by 2,080 — is wrong in both directions, and it's wrong by a lot. As an employee you never saw the full cost of employing you: the company paid the employer half of Social Security and Medicare, your health insurance, any retirement match, and every paid day off. As a freelancer, all of that comes out of the rate you charge, and you only bill a fraction of the hours you actually work. A clean conversion has to account for every one of those gaps.
This tool runs in two directions off the same model. Pick Salary → rate when you're weighing an offer or pricing yourself to match a job you'd otherwise take. Pick Rate → salary when you already freelance and want to know what a "real job" would have to pay to match what you've built.
First, the salary is grossed up into the all-in value of the job — salary plus the benefits-and-employer-tax load — because that's the total you have to replace to come out even. That all-in figure becomes your freelance take-home goal, which is then grossed up again for self-employment tax, expanded for business expenses and a safety margin, and finally divided across the hours you can actually bill:
The reverse runs the exact same chain backward. Your billed revenue is peeled back down — strip the safety margin, subtract expenses, take out self-employment tax — to reach your true all-in take-home. Then the benefits load is removed to land on the base salary a job would need to offer to match it:
Because the two formulas are exact inverses, the converter round-trips cleanly: convert a salary to a rate, hit Swap ⇄, and you land back on the salary you started with. The two inputs people get most wrong are billable hours and the benefits load. Drag the billable-hours slider down toward a realistic 20–25 and watch the equivalent rate jump — that gap is exactly why freelancers who "charge what they made hourly at their job" end up earning far less.
If you already know the take-home you want and just need a number to charge, the freelance rate calculator is the more direct tool. Use this converter when the comparison is the point: deciding between a job offer and going independent, sanity-checking whether your current rate beats a salaried alternative, or explaining to a client or a recruiter why your rate isn't "just" your old salary divided by 2,080.
Because 2,080 is the hours you're paid as an employee, not the hours you can bill as a freelancer, and a salary leaves out everything the employer paid on top of it. Between unbillable admin time, unpaid time off, self-employment tax, business expenses, and the benefits an employer used to cover, a straight salary ÷ 2,080 understates the equivalent freelance rate by roughly half for most people.
It's the value of everything a job gives you beyond base pay, as a percentage of salary: health insurance, any 401(k) match, the employer's half of Social Security and Medicare (~7.65%), and paid time off. For a typical US salaried role that totals somewhere around 20–35%. If a job had unusually rich benefits, push it higher; if it was bare-bones, lower.
Yes. The salary→rate and rate→salary formulas are mathematical inverses built on the same inputs, so converting one way and then back returns your original number. The Swap ⇄ button uses this: it flips the direction and seeds the other field with the result you were just looking at.
No. Every calculation runs entirely in your browser — nothing you type is sent to a server or stored. The link in your address bar updates so you can bookmark or share a scenario, but that link only contains the numbers and direction you chose.
Keep going
Work backward from the take-home you want to the rate you must charge.
Already freelancing? See your new rate and what a raise is worth.
Check a specific project's true effective rate before you say yes.