How to Use
- Calculate an equivalent contract rate: Enter your salary, leave, and benefits conditions and press 'Salary to Rate'.
- Calculate an equivalent (base) salary: Enter your contract rate, potential benefits, and potential leave conditions. Press 'Rate to Salary'.
- If you stuff up, press 'Reset'.
Legend
| Required (Salary conditions) | |
| Optional (Contract conditions) | |
| Leave blank (Calculated fields) |
Glossary
- Base Salary: Your salary, excluding any benefits.
- Benefits: Money or other benefits from your employer in addition to your base salary. (eg Cars, Medical/Dental coverage.) Separated here into Superannuation, Leave Loading, and Other.
- Gross Salary: Base Salary + Benefits.
- Leave Loading: after the Labour Revolution, extra money was given during leave to compensate for loss of overtime, or shift work at penalty rates.
- Superannuation: A form of forced savings contributed to by your employer, most often untouchable before retirement. Equivalent to a US 401(k) or a Singapore CPF. Sometimes the salary offered includes this contribution, sometimes not. Make sure you clarify as the amount can be quite sizable. I've been caught out, and it's not a pleasant feeling.
About
Remuneration ain't remuneration. Calculating how much you are really getting paid is simple, but involved. Converting that to an hourly rate - in case you were thinking of going contracting - is similarly straightforward, but full of traps. Enter this handy calculator, which I hope helps you sort things out whether you are full-time, part-time, overseas, pondering that job offer, or contracting-looking-to-get-salaried.
The presets are based on South Australian Government conditions. Note that the employer's superannuation contribution is NOT included as base salary. Nor should it be, in my opinion, because employer contributions are supposed to increase if you make voluntary contributions to superannuation. By 'packaging' your salary and superannuation, you are forced to pay for extra employer contributions as well as your own.
Tax is a can of worms which I will not open right now. The difficulty lies both in introducing another dimension of calculation, as well as defining what benefits are taxable and what aren't. For example: in Australia superannuation is not taxable, while leave loading is. Benefits like cars and conferences may attract 'Fringe Benefits Tax'. This mess is definitely one for the 'too hard' basket.
The rate to salary calculation involves a recursive binary chop goal-seek algorithm which I am quite proud of.
9 December 2003
15 February 2012 - Removed FrontPage tags. Corrected default long service leave to 5 work days. Added variable hours per day/shift on advice of Mr K. Bettridge esq.