Your hourly pay, as a salary and after tax

Notes

• $22 an hour at 40 hours a week is $45,760 a year before tax. The arithmetic is 22 × 40 × 52 — and the 52 is where most of the disagreement between calculators comes from.
• The 52 assumes you are paid for every week of the year. Salaried work usually is; hourly work often is not. Take two weeks of vacation and ten public holidays with no paid leave and you are paid for 48 weeks, which makes the real figure $42,240 — $3,520 lower. Neither number is wrong; they answer different questions, and which one applies to you is written in your offer letter, not in a calculator.
• A month is not four weeks. Four weekly paychecks is $3,520, but a year has 52 weeks rather than 48, so the true monthly average is $3,813. Paid every two weeks you get 26 cheques, and twice a year that means three cheques in one calendar month — the two months that make a budget look wrong in both directions.
• Overtime starts past 40 hours in a week, not past 80 in a fortnight, and it is paid at one and a half times the rate for non-exempt workers. At 40 hours there is none, but a single busy week crossing 40 triggers it.
• Before tax is roughly 17% above what lands, depending on the state. Federal income tax, Social Security at 6.2% and Medicare at 1.45% come out of every cheque regardless of where you live; state income tax swings the rest, from nothing in nine states to over 9% at the top in California and Oregon.