Real hourly pay calculator
Your business makes a profit. What does one hour of your own work earn?
The example numbers are Nora's from block 1: a made-up bakery that makes $1,300 a month while Nora works 45 hours a week. Change them to yours: the numbers stay in this browser and are not sent anywhere.
Result for the example
- Profit per month
- $1,300(price - variable costs) x items - fixed costs
- Your hours per month
- 180 hhours per week x 4
- What one hour of your work earns
- $7.22profit per month / hours per month
- Compared with your rate
- $7.78 an hour less$15 - what one hour earns
- One hour of your work earns $7.22: less than the $15 you compare it with. See which tasks someone else could do, or what would raise your margin.
- Dividing the monthly profit by weekly hours would give $28.89: four times too much. Use hours per month.
A simple teaching calculator with the formulas of the course. It leaves out taxes, seasons and much of real life, and it is not financial advice.
How it works
Profit per hour = profit per month / (your hours per week x 4)
A business can show a profit and still pay its owner less than a helper. Your own hours are a resource too, even when nobody pays you for them. Divide the profit by every hour you spend on the business: making, selling, messages, admin.
Nora's bakery makes $1,300 a month. She works 45 hours a week, 180 hours a month. $1,300 / 180 = about $7.22 an hour: less than half of the $15 a helper would earn.
A common mistake: Dividing monthly profit by weekly hours: $1,300 / 45 = $28.89 looks like a good wage, but it is four times too much.
Practise this in block 1
Block 1 of Ownwise is free, with no account needed to start: short lessons on costs, margin and break-even, then a made-up case where you make the decisions and see what they lead to.