How much do I actually make per hour?
For a salary, divide the monthly amount by 173.3. That is the real number of working hours in an average month at 40 hours a week. On $5,000 a month that is $28.85 an hour. Most people divide by 160 instead — four weeks of 40 hours — and come out about 8% high, because a month is not four weeks. It is 4.33.
Where 173.3 comes from
A year has 52 weeks and 12 months, so an average month is 52 ÷ 12 = 4.33 weeks. At 40 hours a week that is 40 × 52 ÷ 12 = 173.33 hours. The formula for any schedule is the same:
monthly hours = weekly hours × 52 ÷ 12
- 35 hours a week → 151.7 hours a month
- 40 hours a week → 173.3 hours a month
- 45 hours a week → 195.0 hours a month
- 52 hours a week → 225.3 hours a month
So a $5,000 salary is $28.85 an hour at 40 hours, but $22.19 an hour at 52 — the same paycheque, a 23% cut in what an hour of your life is worth. This is why "what do you make?" is close to meaningless as a question and "what do you make per hour?" is not.
Two things to decide before you trust your own number. Unpaid overtime counts as hours worked — if you are contracted for 40 and consistently do 48, use 48, because those are hours you are not getting back. And decide once whether you are using gross or net; net is more useful for comparing against what you actually spend, gross is easier to compare against job offers. Just do not mix them between sources.
Freelance: divide by the hours you actually spent
A freelance fee is quoted per project, which quietly hides the rate. A $3,600 site build sounds like a great month until you count the hours.
Count all of them:
- the actual production work
- the scoping call and the proposal you wrote before anyone paid you
- revisions, including the two rounds you did not budget for
- invoicing, chasing the invoice, and the bookkeeping
If the build was 34 hours and everything else was another 12, that $3,600 is 46 hours of your life, which is $78.26 an hour. Still good. But if the same fee took 34 hours of building and 40 hours of revisions and chasing — a client you have all met — it is 74 hours and $48.65 an hour, and now it is barely above the salaried rate of someone earning $8,400 a month.
The useful habit is to note roughly how long a project took when you close it, even if you never track time during. A single number in the notes — "~46h" — is enough to compute a real rate later, and it is what tells you which type of client to stop taking.
Income that accrues 24 hours a day
Ad revenue, royalties, rental income, and interest are different in kind. There are no working hours, so the hours in a month is not 173.3 — it is all of them. An average month is 30.44 days × 24 = 730.5 hours.
$150 a month of ad revenue is therefore $0.21 an hour. Next to $28.85 that looks like nothing, and people conclude the side project is not worth it. That is the wrong conclusion, for two reasons.
- The hours are not your hours. The $0.21 accrues at 3am, during your commute, on holiday, and on the days you are sick. The salaried $28.85 requires you to be present and working; the moment you stop being present, it stops. Comparing them per hour compares two different things.
- The relevant divisor is the hours you put in. If that ad revenue came from a site you spent 60 hours building two years ago and now spend 2 hours a month on, this month it earned $75 an hour of your actual effort — and the cumulative return keeps climbing every month you do not touch it.
So keep both numbers. The per-hour rate over 730.5 hours tells you how fast money accumulates while you sleep. The fee divided by hours you personally spent tells you whether it was worth building. They answer different questions and neither replaces the other.
Comparing two side hustles
Say you are choosing between two ways to spend your Saturdays.
- A weekend shift at $16 an hour, 16 hours a week. Monthly: 16 × 16 × 52 ÷ 12 = 69.3 hours for $1,109. Rate: $16, flat, forever, paid reliably.
- A small product that took 120 hours to build and now brings in $150 a month for about 2 hours of upkeep. First year: 144 hours in total, $1,800 out — $12.50 an hour, worse than the shift. Second year: 24 hours in, $1,800 out — $75 an hour. Third year, if nothing changes, the same again.
The shift wins the first year and loses badly after that, provided the product does not decay. The honest comparison needs three columns: the rate, how many of your hours it consumes, and whether the rate goes up or down when you stop paying attention. A shift is stable and capped. A product is volatile and uncapped. Neither is the right answer for everyone, but you cannot even have the argument without the hourly numbers side by side.
One more thing worth pricing: the hours you cannot sell. If the shift is Saturday 9 to 5 and it means you never see anyone, that is a real cost that does not appear in $16 an hour. Put a number on it if you can — even a rough one changes the decision.
Doing this continuously instead of once
These calculations are worth doing once with a calculator, and then never again by hand — because they change every time a rate changes, and the version in your head is always the old one.
This is what Inflowly does with each income source: you enter the amount and the period you actually agreed to ($5,000 a month, $60 an hour, $150 a month of ad revenue) plus whether it accrues during working hours or around the clock, and each source card shows its hourly, daily, and weekly equivalent. The 173.3 and the 730.5 are applied for you, and applied to the right sources — a salary is not spread across your sleeping hours, and ad revenue is not crammed into a nine-to-five. The day's total counts up per second while the app is open, and the home screen widget shows today, this month, and progress toward your monthly goal.