What is your time worth?
A few thought experiments can change how you price your time. This tool helps put a number on it.
Current Income
Let's start with your current work situation. This information is only used for calculation purposes and is not stored or saved anywhere.
How much is your time worth?
The fast answer is your salary divided by the hours you actually work: someone earning 5,000 a month across 40 hours a week is being paid about 30 an hour. That number is useful and incomplete. It tells you what your employer pays for an hour. It does not tell you what an hour is worth to you, which is the number you need when you are deciding whether to spend a Saturday on paperwork, pay someone to do it, or automate it away.
The calculator above asks the question five different ways, because people give very different answers depending on how you frame it, and the gaps between those answers are the interesting part.
Five ways to price an hour
1. Your salary rate
What do you earn, and how many hours do you actually work?
(monthly income × 12) ÷ (hours per week × 50 work weeks)
The baseline. It is what an employer pays for your hour, which is not the same as what the hour is worth to you.
2. Your side rate
What hourly rate would make you take on extra work?
the rate you name, used directly
This is the price at which you are willing to sell an hour you currently keep. It is usually higher than your salary rate.
3. Your buy-back rate
What would you pay to make a 4-hour admin task disappear?
amount you would pay ÷ 3.97 hours saved
What you would spend to get an hour back. This is the number that matters when you are deciding whether to automate something.
4. Your waiting rate
How long would you queue for a 100 gift card?
100 ÷ (minutes you would wait ÷ 60)
Waiting is time you cannot use. How long you tolerate it reveals what you privately think an hour is worth.
5. Your trade-off rate
What salary would make you accept 10% more hours?
(new salary − current salary) ÷ the extra monthly hours
The marginal price of your time, not the average one. Almost always the highest of the five.
Why the result drops the extremes
The calculator does not average all five answers. It sorts them and averages the middle ones, discarding the highest and the lowest. Framing effects are strong here: the waiting-in-line question tends to produce a very high rate, and the salary question a low one. Trimming both ends leaves a figure that does not hinge on whichever question happened to catch you in a particular mood.
If your trimmed number comes out well above your salary rate, that gap is the point. It means you value your hours more than your job prices them, and every hour you spend on work that could be automated is costing you the difference.
What to do with the number
- Set a delegation threshold. Any task you can hand off for less than your hourly number should probably be handed off.
- Price your own admin. Multiply the hours you spend each week on logging, reporting, and status updates by your rate. That annual figure is usually the argument for changing something.
- Sanity-check tool spend. A tool that saves two hours a month pays for itself at twice your hourly rate, and most people underestimate how many hours the small stuff takes.
- Check the estimate against reality. The last point is the hard one: almost nobody knows where their hours actually go. That is what DoneThat measures.
Common questions
Is my time worth the same as my hourly wage?
Rarely. Your wage is an average across every hour your employer buys, including the ones you would happily give away. The hours you would have to be persuaded to give up, such as evenings, weekends, and focused mornings, are worth more to you than that average, which is why the trade-off question usually returns the highest figure of the five.
How much is an hour of free time worth?
Use the buy-back question rather than the salary one. What you would genuinely pay to make an unpleasant four-hour task vanish is a much better estimate of your free time than any calculation based on income, because it is a price you would actually pay.
Does this work if I am self-employed or paid per project?
Yes, and it tends to be more useful. Skip the salary question and answer the other four. Without a fixed wage to anchor on, the buy-back and trade-off rates are the closest thing you have to a real price for your hours.
What if my answers are wildly inconsistent?
That is the normal result, not a mistake. Consistent answers across all five framings are unusual. The spread tells you how much your sense of your own time depends on context, and the trimmed middle is the most defensible single number to carry away.