Ask someone what they earn and they’ll quote the salary. Ask what an hour of their life sells for and almost nobody knows — yet that’s the number every real decision uses. Is the longer commute worth £4k more? Is Saturday overtime good money? Is it worth three hours assembling the flat-pack to save £45? Salary can’t answer those. The hourly rate can, and it takes one small sheet.

The naive number, then the true one

The naive version is division:

= salary / 52 / hours_per_week      → £38,000 ≈ £18.75/hr

But you don’t work hours_per_week. You work those hours plus everything the job takes that never appears on the contract: the commute, the getting-ready, the unpaid overtime, the lunch you eat at your desk. And you don’t receive salary — you receive what’s left after tax, minus the costs the job itself creates: travel, parking, work clothes, the convenience food bought because the job ate the cooking time.

So the true rate is:

= take_home_pay − job_costs
  ─────────────────────────
  contracted + commute + extra hours

Build it with named cells — take_home_mo, job_costs_mo, hours_contract, hours_commute, hours_extra — and the model is four rows and one division.

£18.75the maths £14.30after tax £12.10− job costs £9.40÷ real hours
The same job, repriced honestly. Half the advertised rate is a common result — and decisions made with the left bar are made with someone else's number.

For a typical £38k job with a 50-minute-each-way commute, £180 of monthly job costs and a few unpaid hours, the honest rate lands somewhere near half the naive one. That’s not a trick of the model — it’s the actual exchange rate between your life and your payslip.

What the number is for

Not guilt — pricing. Once true_rate is a named cell, a whole family of decisions becomes arithmetic:

  • Job offers. The £4k raise with a longer commute: rebuild the right-hand side with the new hours and costs. It’s routinely a pay cut per hour — visible in one row, invisible in the offer letter. A remote role at lower salary frequently wins; now you can see by how much.
  • Buying back time. The cleaner, the pre-chopped veg, paying for the direct train: anything that buys an hour for less than true_rate is trading down money you value less for time you value more. (And anything that sells an hour — overtime at flat rate after tax — you can now price too. It’s often below minimum wage; check before saying yes.)
  • The stuff-vs-time converter. Divide any price by true_rate: the £940 phone is 100 working hours at the honest rate — two and a half weeks of your life. Some purchases survive that conversion easily. It’s remarkable how many don’t.

This model is also the quiet engine under the others: the four-number budget tells you what the life costs; this tells you what funds it; and every £100 of monthly spending you trim is, at £9.40 an hour, eleven hours a month you no longer have to sell — the same lever that shortens the pension countdown, measured in the only currency that’s actually scarce.

One honest caution: don’t let the number colonise everything. Time with people you love, work you do for joy — those aren’t priced in this sheet, and converting them is the failure mode. The rate exists to sharpen commercial decisions: what to sell your hours for, and what to buy them back at.

One division, honestly fed. You’ve been quoting your price for years — this is finding out what it actually was.