When calculating a salaried employee’s hourly rate for payment purposes, knowing how many work hours there are in a year is helpful. This number is calculated using a simple formula that fluctuates depending on how many hours a person is working in a typical week and how many vacation days and holidays they receive in a year.
Stats & Overview
According to statistics, Americans work longer hours than their counterparts in the Western world. However, there’s often a gap between the number of hours worked in a year and the average amount of time spent working.
- There are 2,080 work hours in a year for a typical employee that works a 40-hour workweek 52 weeks a year.
- The OPM, on the other hand, estimates hourly pay rates based on a year of 2,087 work hours.
- The average full-time employee in the United States works 1,801 hours each year.
- There are 1,820 work hours in a year for a 35-hour workweek employee.
- A typical corporate employee will work 1,943 hours in a year, assuming 8 paid holidays and 10 days of PTO (the US norm).
- Every year, Americans work 258 hours more than Europeans.
- There are 4 years with 2,096 hour hours, 17 years with 2088 work hours, and 7 years with 2,080 work hours in each 28-year cycle. This is the time it takes for the calendar to repeat; an average of 2,087 labor hours in a year.
Meanwhile, the total number of working hours in 2023, or example, will be:
| Month | Work Days | Work Hours |
|---|---|---|
| January | 21 | 168 |
| February | 20 | 160 |
| March | 23 | 184 |
| April | 22 | 176 |
| May | 21 | 168 |
| June | 22 | 176 |
| July | 22 | 176 |
| August | 22 | 176 |
| September | 22 | 176 |
| October | 21 | 168 |
| November | 22 | 176 |
| December | 23 | 184 |
| Total | 261 | 2,088 |
From the table, will be 261 workdays or 2,088 work hours in 2021. Please keep in mind that this does not include any holidays.
Whether you’re just starting out in the workforce or have been a full-time or part-time employee for a while, it is crucial to know how many hours you work in a year.
For starters, it helps you determine whether you have a healthy work-life balance. You will also be able to decipher how much money you make for each hour you spend at work.
Furthermore, understanding these metrics can be crucial in making a career move, a job change, or a lifestyle change. Moves like this often have an impact on salary requirements for both employees and employers.
But even if this is not the end game, there are other benefits that come with having these pieces of information in close range. You can keep track of and quantify the amount of time you devote to your job, even if income or promotions aren’t contingent on it.
How then do you go about really figuring out how many hours you work in a year? Below, we’ll go over how to compute this number and the tons of benefits that come with it.
How many Work hours Are There in a Week?
Every week, the average American works 34.4 hours. And those between the ages of 25 and 54 often work 40.5 hours a week on average.
But regardless of these numbers, you must be paid for every hour of overtime you work if you are an hourly, non-exempt employee. Overtime is basically any time worked in a calendar week that exceeds 40 hours.
Importance of Knowing How Many Working Hours You Have in a Year
As previously said, knowing how many hours you work per year has a direct impact on your well-being and job satisfaction. This number can be useful in a variety of situations.
It aids you in calculating your annual revenue; even though that’s a piece of cake for salary-earners. However, if you work as an hourly employee, knowing how many hours you will be able to work in a given year can allow you to determine your annual take-home pay.
This is pretty basic information for anyone planning to budget for substantial purchases such as a home or a car.
This, however, does not only apply to hourly workers. Salaried employees usually work more than the standard 40-hour workweek on default. It still doesn’t rule out the need for pieces of information such as this.
Some important benefits for Salary Earners include:
- Understanding how your compensation is divided into the amount of time you put into your employment each year; helping you figure out how much money you make per hour. You can utilize this to your advantage when asking for a raise or promotion,
- Knowing how many hours you put in over the course of a year can help you plan activities and events outside of work. You can better plan your free time if you know how many hours you need to devote to work.
- It lets you evaluate your work-life balance, which is one of the most important benefits. We all know that working too many hours reduces productivity and efficiency, so knowing if your work-life balance is off will help you evaluate if you’re working too much or too little.
- This metric can also provide insight into your work habits and tendencies. This allows you to make changes to free up more time for your personal life.
How Do I Determine the Number of Working Hours in a Year?
When you work the same number of hours each week, calculating this number is relatively simple. You may, however, need to account for vacation days, personal days, and holidays.
If your work hours are unpredictable, you may need to keep a consistent log to calculate the exact amount of hours you work each year.
How to Calculate Full-Time Working Hours in a Year
A standard workweek consists of 40 hours. Calculating the number of hours you work as a full-time, 40-hour-per-week employee is easy, but not in the way you may assume. But that doesn’t make it an impossible feat.
First, calculate the number of hours worked in a month by multiplying 40 hours by four weeks, which is 160 hours.
You may be tempted to double the 160 hours each month by the number of months worked in a year, which in most situations is 12.
However, if we add these values together, we obtain a total of 1,920 hours per year, which is incorrect. A month does not necessarily have four weeks.
To get a closer estimate, multiply the typical 40-hour workweek by 52 weeks in a year. This yields a greater number of 2,080 hours per year. This is a significantly more accurate reflection of a typical full-time employee’s hours.
It's worth noting that the US Federal Government uses 2,087 as the average number for full-time employment, accounting for leap years.
Time Addition and Subtraction
You can choose to add overtime hours or subtract any vacation, personal time, or holidays you may not have worked to get a more accurate total for the number of hours you worked in a year.
These days most employers often pay for these days when it comes to salary earners. In other words, you may not need to deduct them from your total working days.
Employees can compute their accurate amount of working hours by deducting eight hours for each day they did not work if these days are not paid.
Similarly, overtime hours or hours that surpass the standard 40-hour workweek should be added to your total. Overtime is usually computed by the hour, so if you’ve been keeping track of your hours, this should be simple to incorporate.
How Do You Work Out Your Hourly Pay For the Year?
Salaried employees may be interested in learning what their true hourly rate is, especially if they work more than the standard 40-hour workweek. It’s tough to tell how much you make per hour at a glance because salaried employees receive the same amount in their paycheck every pay period.
To get a hang of this, divide your compensation by the 52 weeks mentioned above. Then divide that sum by the average number of hours you work per week to get your hourly pay average. And based on the number of hours worked and your annual salary, this will give you the actual hourly pay you receive.
This might can be shocking at times, especially if you regularly work more than 40 hours per week. You can, however, choose to make changes to your work style or lifestyle based on whether this number is good or bad.
Perhaps you are making less than you thought per hour depending on the hours you work. Use this as an opportunity to ask for a raise and lay out the numbers for your manager.
Similarly, if you work too many hours, you might have a workload problem or have unrealistic expectations. This should also be brought up with your boss. Requesting a better work-life balance is a common and feasible request that your boss should consider seriously.
How Many Hours Do I Need to Work?
Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all response to this topic. This is because the variations are excessive depending on the person, profession, industry, firm, and job title. It will also vary by country, as people in countries other than the United States tend to work in different ways than Americans.
Compared to the average hours worked in 1979, workers have much fewer work hours per year today.
For example, in 1979, the average hours worked in the USA was 1,829, while in 2015, the average was 1,790.
The United States has one of the highest annual labor force participation rates in the world. Europeans, for example, work up to 19% fewer hours than their American counterparts. This equates to an additional 258 hours per year.
The average working hours by industry also makes a significant variation. By industry, the oil and gas market experienced the largest number of working hours per week at 42.4 on average. Paper production is right on its heels, with an average of 41.9 working hours each week.
Furthermore, the leisure and hospitality industry has the lowest number of hours calculated, at just under 29 per week.
Workweek Practices By Country
Outside of the United States, most countries have laws that limit the length of the workweek. Along with Australia and New Zealand, most European countries provide their employees with 20 days of paid vacation per year. Canada and Japan both provide ten paid vacation days.
Unfortunately, there is no law that requires you to take time off if you live in the United States. This is why having these discussions with your future employer before accepting a job offer is so vital.
It is up to you to decide how many hours you should work based on your obligations, stamina, and future career aspirations. Only you have the power to decide how much or how little you want to work.
Working hours will, in most cases, affect your financial take-home pay. However, depending on your situation or future ambitions, working fewer hours and earning less money may be the best option for you, just as working longer hours and earning more money may be the best option for someone else.
Some Pointers on How to Make the Most of a Single Year’s Worth of Time When It Comes to Contracts
Not all government contracting activities are judged by the number of products a company will supply at first. For those providing government services, it gets a little more complex. And because the contract must be set out before the work is completed, the contracting official must decide how many hours the contracted company’s employees will be expected to work.
To make things easier for you we’ll go over a couple of things you should know before going down this path;
FTE
The FTE (Full-Time Equivalent), which is the number of full-time employees a company has every week — and, by extension, their hours — is critical in this process.
First off, to determine how many FTE a company may provide, you would divide the entire number of hours in a period by the number of working hours in that time; Monday through Friday. When you get a number from this calculation, each FTE is equal to one full-time employee (40 hours per week).
When calculating person-years, however, keeping the number of FTEs in mind can help you figure out how high or low to go. It will also provide the employer a better picture of what the contract requires in terms of employee numbers. But what exactly is person-years?
Person Years
Person years are a measure of how many hours a company is expected to provide per year, if FTE is, for all intents and purposes, a computation of persons and their hours that a company can be expected to contribute per week. And because contracts are typically for years, this is an especially crucial metric to track. You don’t want to encourage a company to overwork its staff or take away benefits. But then you also want to get the maximum productivity out of them during their contracted period. So, what is the best way to calculate the number of hours in a year for a single person?
Best Way to Calculate the Number of Working Hours in a Year for a Person on Contract
Because there are so many variables — most companies give their employees time off for vacations, holidays, sick leave, emergencies, jury duty, company-specific training time, reserve duty, short-term disability, and even pregnancy, most of which cannot be predicted by a contracting official — this is difficult to calculate. Not only can subtractions be made, but additions can be made as well, for example, for working overtime or on the sixth or seventh day of the week.
It should be noted that, according to the FAR, no contractor or subcontractor employing laborers or mechanics may require them to work more than 40 hours per week without paying them at least 1 to 12 times their basic pay rate for each hour worked overtime. This is why employers may be hesitant to give their employees overtime work. Humans are unpredictable by nature, yet contracting officials are unhappily forced to forecast their activities in order to draft a decent contract.
What Is The Number Of Hours In A Year?
After estimating the number of work hours in a year, I sat down one day and realized how much time our occupations take away from us. We have 365 days in a year, which equates to around 8,760 hours. But, aside from working and sleeping, how much time do we actually have?
Here’s how to go about this:
260 workdays x 11 hours per day (+3 hours for getting dressed, commuting, and a one-hour lunch break) = 2860 hours worked
Sleeping 8 hours per day x 365 days per year = 2920 hours for sleeping
8,760 hours per year – 2860 work hours – 2920 sleeping hours = 2980 hours per year to ourself
As a result of all of these computations, you’d understand how valuable our time is. We have around 2980 hours every year to do whatever we want if we’re lucky. That doesn’t even take into account the time spent cooking, cleaning, child-bearing, and the countless other tasks that must be completed. So make the most of your time by enjoying life and taking care of yourself.
And we can’t close this article without discussing financial implications!
Keeping track of how many hours you work can also help you save money. For example, I consider some things in terms of the amount of time it will take me to pay for them. That Birkin bag isn’t $11,000 if you’re paid $15 an hour; it’s 733 hours of your life. That $40 restaurant lunch took 2.6 hours to prepare. Doesn’t that make you pause and consider your options before making a purchase?
Other Appplications
Like I mentioned earlier, when calculating an employee’s yearly compensation for a salary or converting a salary to an hourly rate if schedules change, the number of work hours in a year can be useful.
Simply multiply the suggested hourly rate by the number of work hours in a year to calculate an employee’s yearly pay for a salary. If your company pays for vacation days or even holidays, you’ll need to subtract the number of hours in a year before removing the vacation days or holidays. So, if Juan makes $23 per hour, works 40 hours per week, and has 10 paid holidays and 14 vacation days per year, he should earn $47,850.
If he is paid for vacation days but not for holidays, he should make $46,010 ($47,850 minus his hourly rate multiplied by the 8 hours from each of the 10 holiday days). He should receive $43,434 ($47,850 less his hourly rate multiplied by the 8 hours from each of the 24 holiday and vacation days) if all of his vacation days and holidays are unpaid.
Simply divide the yearly income by the number of work hours in a year to convert a person’s compensation to an hourly rate. Remember to add any paid vacation or holiday hours for which the employee is compensated. For example, if Alicia earns $72,000 per year, works 40 hours per week, and receives seven paid holidays and ten unpaid vacation days, she will work 2,000 hours in total. This equates to a wage of $36 per hour.
Employers Who Pay Weekly, Bi-Weekly, or Semi-Monthly
Employers can choose to pay employees biweekly or semimonthly, but regardless of how a paycheck is issued, employers will need to know the employee’s per-hour rate in order to calculate their pay for a given period. A weekly paycheck for a 40-hour-per-week employee should cover 40 hours, bi-weekly payments should cover 80 hours, and semi-monthly payments should cover 86.67 hours. Unpaid holidays and vacation days should be subtracted from the hours used to calculate the pay period.
How Many Working Hours Are There in a Year
There are 2,080 work hours in a year for a typical employee that works a 40-hour workweek 52 weeks a year.
How Many Hours Do I Need to Be Working in a Year
Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all response to how many hours you should ve working in a year. This is because the variations are excessive depending on the person, profession, industry, firm, and job title.
How Many Hours Is 40 Hours a Week for 1 Year?
A full-time employee works 2,080 hours a year, based on a standard work week of 40 hours (40 hours a week x 52 weeks a year).
How Many Hours Does the Average Person Work by Year?
A full-time worker in the United States works an average of 1,801 hours a year, or 37.5 hours per week, which is greater than other OECD nations.
How Do I Calculate My Work Hours?
How to determine working hours
Step 1: Determine start and end time. Record the beginning and ending times of your shift.
Step 2: is to convert time to military time.
The next step is to subtract start time from finish time…
Step four: deduct unpaid breaks…
Convert to decimal format (Step 5).
Step 6: Add up total hours for the pay period
Related Articles
