True Hourly

Your stated salary is not your hourly rate. True Hourly calculates what you're actually earning per hour, accounting for actual hours worked and the trades comparison that reframes how most white-collar workers think about their compensation.

The Input Model

Enter your annual salary, your average hours worked per week (including email, commute time-on-call, and weekend work), your weeks of actual time off per year, and your city.

The tool outputs your real hourly rate and positions it on a percentile curve against trades workers in your metro area.

The Trades Comparison

This is the part that surprises people. A licensed electrician in Boston earns $48-65/hour at the journeyman level. They clock out. They don't have Slack. Their cognitive load largely stays at work.

A $130,000-a-year knowledge worker in Boston, working honest hours and accounting for actual time, often earns $35-45/hour effective. The comparison isn't flattering.

The point isn't that everyone should become an electrician. The point is that "highly paid" is a relative term that depends heavily on how many hours you're selling.

The Secondary Outputs

The tool also calculates: your effective hourly rate after income taxes (using marginal rate for the city you selected), what a 10% reduction in weekly hours would be worth in effective hourly rate increase, and what annual salary you'd need to match your rate with fewer hours.

The Response I Get

The most common response from people who use this tool is that they renegotiate something — their hours, their salary, or their expectations about what their job is actually providing them.

That's the intended outcome. Clarity about what you're actually trading for what you're actually getting.