Hours of Work Calculator: What a Price Costs in Your Time

This calculator runs entirely in your browser: nothing you type is uploaded, stored or sent anywhere, and your wage stays on your device. Enter a price and what you earn per hour, or your monthly take-home pay and the hours behind it, and it shows how long you have to work to pay for the thing. It also shows the same for five reference prices, so that after a minute with the page you can carry the conversion in your head. Prices are abstract. Hours of your life are not, and for many people that is the difference between a purchase that is thought about and one that is not.

How to use it

1. The currency symbol prefixes prices in the table and the note under the result. The arithmetic ignores it.
2. The price is the full amount you will hand over, tax, shipping and fees included. It opens at $120. Replace that with the thing you are actually thinking about buying.
3. Paid by the hour? Keep hourly wage mode and type your rate. Salaried? Switch to monthly pay and hours, then enter your monthly take-home pay and the hours you work in a typical month, and the calculator divides one by the other.
4. Use after-tax figures, both of them. The hours you work to earn a price are paid in the money that reaches your account, and a gross figure makes every purchase look cheaper in time than it really is.
5. The big number is hours and minutes of work. Once it passes eight hours a second line converts it to days at 8 hours each. The note alongside shows the hourly rate being used, which is how you check what a monthly-pay entry worked out to.
6. Under all of it, the table. The rows for $10, $50, $100, $500 and $1,000 stay fixed while the times move with your rate, and those five are the reference points worth memorising.

What hours of work means here

The calculation is a single division:

hours of work = price ÷ hourly rate

and in monthly mode the rate is:

hourly rate = monthly take-home pay ÷ hours worked per month

Days of work are hours divided by 8, shown to one decimal once the price costs at least a full day. A 160-hour month is 20 working days of 8 hours, which is the usual full-time pattern; if you work 45-hour weeks, enter 195 hours and the rate falls accordingly.

The idea behind the calculator is older than the web. In Your Money or Your Life, Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin described money as something you trade your life energy for, and proposed that every purchase be evaluated in the hours of life it took to earn. Their version goes further than this page: they adjust the wage downward for commuting time, work clothes, meals bought because of work, and the time spent recovering from it, and call the result the real hourly wage. That adjustment is the subject of estimate your real hourly wage, and it always lowers the rate, which raises the hours every price costs.

This calculator uses the plain paid rate, because it is the one people can enter with confidence. Treat the result as a minimum. With the adjustments, the true figure is always higher.

One field does more damage than the rest, and it is the wage. Almost everyone's first instinct is to type the gross rate, because that is the number on the contract and the number you say out loud when somebody asks. It flatters every purchase on this page by a third or so. If the hours come back lower than you expected, check that field before you believe them.

What the division leaves out

Division is honest and it is limited, which is a short list worth reading before you take the number anywhere.

It ignores the costs of working. Commuting, clothes, lunches, childcare that exists only because the job does, the evening that goes to recovering from it: none of that shows up in a paid rate, and all of it means your real hourly wage is lower than the figure you typed. Sometimes by a third.

It has no view on value either. Nine hours of work for a jacket worn every day for five years is a different proposition from nine hours for one worn twice, and both come back as nine hours.

It also does not know your obligations. Rent, food and a child's shoes cost hours too, and they are not optional. This lens does its best work on purchases where there is a real choice and its worst work as a way to feel bad about necessities.

If your hours or pay move around, the rate is an average and the answer is a scale rather than a figure. Usually that is enough. The question you are asking is whether something costs an hour or a week, not whether it costs 6.0 or 6.4.

And it is not advice. It converts units.

Three conversions

The default: $120 at $20 an hour is exactly 6 hours. Most of a working day for a pair of shoes, a concert ticket, or a week of bought lunches. At the same rate the table reads 30 minutes for $10, 2 hours 30 minutes for $50, 5 hours for $100, 25 hours or 3.1 days for $500, and 50 hours or 6.3 days for $1,000.

Salaried mode changes the denominator rather than the price. Take-home pay of $3,000 over 160 hours is $18.75 an hour, so the same $120 becomes 6 hours 24 minutes, and a $1,000 phone is 53 hours 20 minutes, or 6.7 working days. Now count the daily commute and call it 190 hours a month. The rate drops to $15.79 and the phone costs 63 hours 20 minutes. Nothing about the phone changed. The denominator got more honest.

The third case is a total rather than a thing. The subscription cost calculator might hand you a yearly figure of $1,041 for four subscriptions. Put that in at $20 an hour and it is 52 hours, or 6.5 days of work a year, to keep four services running. At $35 an hour, 29 hours 45 minutes. Both are real answers to a question the monthly prices never bothered to ask.

Keeping the conversion in use

The calculator is a way of looking at one price at a time. The habit is looking at every price this way, and that needs the prices to be somewhere you can see them.

In Cash Book, the Home screen leads with one number for the period and a curve under it, and every logged purchase sits below grouped by day. Once your rate is in your head, that number reads as hours without any further arithmetic: a day total of $60 at $20 an hour is three hours of the day just gone. The point of logging quickly is that the number stays complete, and Cash Book's four ways in are built for that. Tap the mic and say "eighteen fifty lunch" and voice logging files it with a tag and a date. A card tap through Apple Pay can be logged with no input at all once the Apple Pay auto-logging automation is set up in Shortcuts. A receipt with many lines goes through receipt scanning.

For the pause before a purchase, a budget on a tag does what the calculator does in a different unit: the thin bar shows how much of the month's allowance the purchase would use, and it is red only when the limit is passed. Some people find hours more persuasive than bars, and some the other way round; the app supports the bar and this page supports the hours.

Two guides sit under this calculator. The price in hours of work method is the method as a daily practice: when to apply it, what it is good for and where it turns into an excuse not to spend on anything. Estimate your real hourly wage walks through the adjustments from Your Money or Your Life so that the rate you enter is the one you actually earn. For the wider habit, how to stop impulse buying covers the moment between wanting and paying, where this calculator does its best work.

The other tools

The other calculators on this site express money in other useful units. The 50/30/20 budget calculator turns take-home pay into needs, wants and savings shares, and the hours behind the wants share are the hours you have for things like the one you just priced. The daily spending allowance calculator gives what is left after fixed costs as a daily figure; at your rate, that is a daily number of hours too. The savings goal calculator shows when a goal arrives at a given monthly amount, which in hours is how many working days a month go to the goal. The subscription cost calculator produces yearly totals that this page converts to days. And the small purchases calculator prices a repeated habit and, given a wage, shows it as hours per year using the same division.

Where to go next

The conversion is easy to remember and easy to forget to apply. The way to keep it in use is to have the prices in front of you, which is what a tracker does.

Get the prices logged first. How to track expenses on iPhone is the starting guide, covering the four ways to log and why speed is what keeps a log complete. Then read the month as hours: Insights shows spending by tag against the month before, and any tile divided by your rate is hours, which makes the tag that grew the one that cost you the most extra time at work.

After that, go and refine the rate. Read the real hourly wage guide once, work out your adjusted figure and bring it back here. Every price will cost more hours than it did, and every one of those hours will be truer.

Then keep the table. $10, $50, $100, $500 and $1,000 at your own rate is a small set of numbers worth knowing by heart. That is the whole calculator, carried around without the page.

Get Cash Book on the App StoreFree for 7 days. $19.99 once for lifetime.

Get Cash Book on the App StoreFree for 7 days. $19.99 once for lifetime.