Annual versus hourly wages and 2,080 hours

Every wage table on this site has an hourly row and an annual row. For most occupations they are the same information written two ways, joined by one number: 2,080.

Where 2,080 comes from

Forty hours a week for fifty-two weeks is 2,080 hours. BLS uses it as the standard full-time, year-round work year when it converts between hourly and annual pay in OEWS. An hourly median of $25.00 appears as an annual median of $52,000; an annual salary of $83,200 reported by an employer is placed into the hourly wage intervals at $40.00.

The convention runs in both directions. Employers who pay annual salaries report them as such, and BLS divides by 2,080 to put salaried workers into the same twelve hourly intervals as hourly workers before estimating percentiles. The published annual percentiles are then the hourly percentiles multiplied back by 2,080.

What it assumes

The annual figure assumes a worker is employed full time for the whole year. It is not an estimate of what workers in the occupation actually earned in a year, which depends on hours and weeks worked. Part-time workers and seasonal workers are included in the hourly estimate at their hourly rate, and the annual row describes what their rate would produce over 2,080 hours, not what they took home. For occupations with many part-time workers, such as cashiers or home health aides, the annual row overstates typical annual earnings.

The convention also ignores overtime. OEWS wages are straight-time rates, so an occupation where a 50-hour week is normal shows the 40-hour annual equivalent.

Occupations published one way only

For some occupations the conversion does not make sense, and BLS publishes only one form. Occupations that typically work less than a full year, or whose hours are not comparable to a standard week, get an annual wage only: elementary, middle and secondary school teachers, postsecondary teachers, airline pilots and flight attendants, and athletes among them. Their hourly cells carry a marker meaning not available, and this site shows the annual row alone. Occupations that are typically paid by the hour or engagement with no annual equivalent, such as actors, musicians and dancers, get an hourly wage only, and the annual row is blank.

The source files flag both cases explicitly, and the flag is preserved in the data behind the occupation pages. A blank row of this kind is not suppression; see suppressed cells for the difference.

Comparing with other figures

The 2,080-hour annual figure is comparable to a posted salary for a full-time position and to the annual pay bands in federal and military tables. It is not directly comparable to annual earnings from the Current Population Survey or the American Community Survey, which measure what people actually received over a year, including the effect of weeks and hours worked and of multiple jobs; see earnings by education.

Nor is it comparable to a minimum wage without the same assumption. A state minimum wage of $15.00 corresponds to $31,200 a year at 2,080 hours, which is how the floor relates to the bottom of an occupation’s annual table, but a minimum-wage worker with 30 hours a week earns less than that.

On this site

Where BLS publishes both rows, both are shown and the annual row is marked as assuming 2,080 hours. Where BLS publishes one, only that one is shown and the page says which. No row is derived here that BLS did not publish, and the hourly and annual medians on a page are never computed from each other.

The number to remember is 2,080. When an annual wage looks higher than an occupation’s reputation suggests, check whether the people in it usually work a full year.