What an hour is actually worth
What’s your time actually worth?
Three useful situations to know your effective hourly rate. Pricing freelance work against an employed peer. Deciding whether a side gig is worth your time. Comparing job offers with different working-hours expectations. Same maths underpins all three — but the SA defaults matter.
The maths, properly
Annual gross divided by working hours in the year. The working hours in the year depend on weeks per year and hours per week — and the choice of both matters more than most people realise.
Hourly = annual ÷ (weeks per year × hours per week)
The calculator above also surfaces weekly, monthly, and annual alongside the hourly, so you can spot weirdness fast if you’ve mistyped a salary or made a mistake on hours.
SA defaults: 45 hours, 52 weeks
The BCEA ordinary-hours maximum for employees below the BCEA earnings threshold is 45 hours per week (Section 9). Most SA full-time contracts respect that — even above the earnings threshold where the cap doesn’t strictly apply. Some white-collar contracts use 40 or 37.5 hours (lunch unpaid), and some sectoral determinations enforce lower maximums.
52 weeks/year is the default because SA labour law guarantees paid annual leave — you’re paid for all 52 weeks even though you only physically work 48–49. The exception is genuinely intermittent work where you’re paid only for weeks worked — use 48 for that.
The employed-to-freelance translation
The single most useful application of this calculator: working out what you’d need to charge as a freelancer to match a salaried equivalent.
An employed hourly rate of R150 looks the same on paper as a R150 freelance rate — but the employed version includes:
- 15–21 days paid annual leave
- Paid sick leave (BCEA: 30 days over a 3-year cycle)
- 13th cheque (if your contract includes one)
- Employer medical-aid contribution (often half)
- Employer retirement-fund contribution (often half)
- UIF (1% paid by employer)
- Stable income — paid weekly/monthly regardless of demand
A freelancer carries all of these costs themselves, plus the risk that next month’s pipeline empties. To match an employed-equivalent R150/hour, the freelance hourly needs to land closer to R225–R300. Less and you’re effectively working for less than employed peers; more and you start pricing out of the market.
Working out a target salary from a desired hourly
The reverse direction also matters. If you’re a freelancer wanting to figure out what salary an employer would have to offer to get you to switch, divide your freelance hourly by 1.7 (a midpoint of the 1.5–2× freelance markup), then multiply by 45 × 52 to get the equivalent employed annual.
A R400/hour freelance rate divides to ~R235/hour employed equivalent. Times 45 × 52 = R549,900 annual ≈ R45,000 monthly. That’s roughly the salary at which an employer would need to land to match what you currently earn as a freelancer, factoring in the benefits a salaried position adds.
The part-time honesty check
Be careful with “pro-rata” part-time offers. An employer might offer R20,000/month for half the hours of a R40,000/month full-time job. The hourly rate is identical — but part-time work usually compresses the work that actually has to get done, meaning the effective hourly productivity demanded is higher.
Run the part-time monthly through the calculator with the actual hours. If the result is materially lower than the full-time hourly equivalent for the same role, the employer is using “pro-rata” to underpay. Negotiate based on the hourly, not the headline monthly.