Ballast
Ballast/Time desk/No. 03

Calculate · Time desk · 60 seconds

Your Effective Hourly Value

Most people know their salary and have never once computed the number that actually governs their decisions: what one hour of their life clears, after tax, at the hours they truly keep. This instrument prints it — per hour, per day, per minute — and shows how much of your waking year the work consumes.

Currency-agnostic · symbol only Rules version 1.0 Reviewed July 2026

The manifest — your numbers

Σ

What actually lands after tax — salary, bonus, distributions, all of it.

h / wk

The contractual or nominal week. This gives the flattering number.

h / wk

Include the commute, the always-on evenings, the Sunday inbox. This gives the true one.

weeks

52 minus leave and holidays. The house default is 46.

Nothing you type leaves this page. The instrument runs entirely in your browser; there is no account and no record.

The reading

Trimmed.

$104/h

effective net value of one hour · the number every other instrument uses

The ledger

Paper hourly — the number in your head
Effective hourly — the number that's true
The honesty discount
One working day of yours
One minute of yours

Three versions of your week

The week you countHours / wkYour hour is worth

What moves this result

What would sink this reading

Gross thinking. Quotes, fees and prices are paid in net money; value your hour in gross and every trade you make is flattered by your tax rate.

This is an average, not a marginal wage — you can't necessarily sell one more hour at this price. But every quote, meeting and errand buys hours at it.

Seasonality hides load. If quarter-ends run 65-hour weeks, your true annual figure sits lower than the calm-week number you just entered.

Questions people bring to this desk

How do I calculate my real hourly rate from a salary?
Take net annual income — what lands after tax — and divide by honest annual hours: real weekly hours including commute, times weeks actually worked. A $240,000 net year at 50 honest hours over 46 weeks is about $104 per hour, not the $115+ the paper week suggests.
Why use net income instead of gross?
Because everything you'd trade an hour against — a cleaner's quote, a business-class upgrade, a delegated task — is paid in after-tax money. Valuing your hour in gross flatters every such trade by exactly your tax rate.
What counts as working hours?
Anything the work takes from your waking life: the contracted hours, the commute, the evening calls, the inbox on Sunday. If a week would look different without the job, those hours belong in the denominator.
Methodology — the formula, printed

Everything below is calculated from your inputs. Nothing is fetched, nothing is looked up.

paper_hourly = net_income / (paper_hours × weeks) effective_hourly = net_income / (honest_hours × weeks) waking_share = honest_hours × weeks / 5,840 5,840 — a waking year: 16 hours × 365 days

The gauge reads your working hours as a share of the waking year. The sustained-load line sits at 40% — a house convention: past it, work is consuming more of your conscious life than everything else combined leaves room to repair. Above 55%, the instrument calls the load heavy outright.

Limitations. The figure is an average across the year, not the value of your next marginal hour. It also says nothing about how the hours feel — a loved 50-hour week and a hated one price the same here and nowhere else.