Hourly wage versus annual salary
The arithmetic, and the two mistakes nearly everyone makes.
Moving between an hourly rate and a salary sounds like simple multiplication. Two details make it less simple, and both cost real money when you are comparing jobs.
The conversion
Hourly to annual: hourly rate × paid hours per week × paid weeks per year. A 39-hour week at €15 is €585 a week and €30,420 a year.
Annual to hourly: reverse it. A €38,000 salary over a 39-hour week is €730.77 a week and €18.74 an hour.
Mistake one: four weeks in a month
A month is about 4.33 weeks, not 4. Multiplying a weekly wage by four understates your monthly pay by roughly 8%. Always go via the annual figure and divide by twelve.
Mistake two: ignoring unpaid breaks
A salaried job with a paid lunch break and an hourly job with an unpaid one are not comparable on the headline rate. Thirty minutes a day unpaid across five days is 2.5 hours a week — over a year, more than three working weeks of time at the workplace that nobody pays for.
The honest comparison is pay divided by hours away from home, not pay divided by paid hours.
What each form gives you
An hourly rate makes overtime and premiums visible and pays you for every hour worked. A salary smooths your income across quiet and busy weeks and usually comes with more predictable holiday pay. Neither is better in the abstract — it depends on whether your hours are stable.