How to Figure Out How Many Hours You Work in a Year

Figuring out your work hours in a year is important for a number of reasons, including figuring out your hourly wage if you receive a salary. The calculation is relatively simple when the same number of hours are worked every week, although you may want to take vacation days and holidays into account. If the number of hours you work is different every week, then a running log may be the only way to know for sure how many hours you work in a year.

A full-time work week is assumed to be 40 hours per week. For full-time workers, you can quickly calculate the number of hours worked in a month by multiplying 40 hours times four weeks. The result is 160 hours per month.

Since there are 12 months in a year, we can multiply 160 times 12 for a result of 1,920 hours per year. However, this calculation is not completely accurate because each month does not include exactly four weeks. A more accurate figure can be calculated by multiplying 40 hours per week times 52 weeks in a year, for a more accurate result of 2,080 hours per year.

The U.S. Federal Government uses 2,087 as the average number of hours of full-time work per year. This number takes into account the fact that the number of workdays in a year fluctuates due to leap year, with some years having 365 days and some having 366. Budget legislation enacted in 1982 mandates that the number of workdays per year over a 28-year period be used to come up with the average number of work hours per year. This is how the number 2,087 was determined.

If you want to know the exact number of hours you worked in a given year, you should subtract for vacation time, sick leave and other days spent away from work. For salaried employees, these days are generally paid, so you may want to just count them along with other days worked. If these days are unpaid, they can be subtracted from total work hours by deducting eight hours for each vacation and sick day. For example, if you were away from work for 10 days of vacation, subtract 10 times 8, or 80, hours from your annual total.

You should also add in overtime hours that exceed your usually scheduled work hours. This may be because your workload is seasonal, with some times of year requiring extra hours. So if you work 10 extra hours per week for four weeks, you would add 10 times 4, or 40, extra hours to your annual total.

If your work part-time or have irregular work hours, you may want to track your time using an app, online tool or a spreadsheet on your computer. Track either the start and end time for each day of work or the amount of elapsed work time. If your hours are somewhat the same from month to month, you can track your hours for a month and then multiply the result by 12 to come up with your estimated annual salary.

When you're tracking your time, you may find that it's tedious to figure your exact hours worked because hours are tracked in 60-minute intervals. There are time card apps and websites that do this calculation for you and return the number of hours worked in decimal format. For example, if you started work at 8:35 and stopped at 12:15, the number of hours worked would be returned as 3.67. Adding the hours for a week and month is much easier when totals are in decimal format.