Pay Raise Calculator: New Salary, Hourly & Take-Home

A raise is usually quoted one way — "4%" or "a dollar an hour" — and lived another: an extra amount in each paycheck, a little less than that after tax, and a real gain that depends on how fast prices rose over the same year. The calculator turns whichever number you were given into all of those, and projects what the same raise would do if it came every year.

The arithmetic

New salary = old salary × (1 + raise %). A dollar-an-hour raise is worth 2,080 times that a year at 40 hours a week, so $1 an hour is $2,080 a year and $2 an hour is $4,160. To turn a dollar raise into a percentage, divide it by the old pay: $2 on $20 an hour is 10%, the same $2 on $40 is 5%. Per paycheck, divide the yearly raise by the number of paychecks — 26 for every two weeks, 24 for twice a month.

How much of a raise you keep

The extra pay is taxed at your marginal rate, not your average rate. A 5% raise on $50,000 adds $2,500 gross; for a single filer with no state tax in 2026 about $2,009 of it reaches take-home pay, because those dollars fall in the 12% federal bracket and 7.65% goes to Social Security and Medicare. Moving into a higher bracket never reduces what you take home — only the dollars above the line are taxed at the new rate.

Real raise versus inflation

If prices rose 3% over the year and pay rose 3%, you can buy what you bought before — no more. The real raise is (1 + raise) ÷ (1 + inflation) − 1, so a 5% raise against 3% inflation is a real raise of about 1.94%, not 2%. The inflation field is optional; the Consumer Price Index from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is the usual figure to use, and the 12-month change is the one to compare with an annual raise.

Raises compound

A raise is paid on top of every earlier raise. Four percent a year for ten years is not 40% — it is 48.02%, because each year's 4% is calculated on a larger salary. The same effect works against you when a raise is skipped: the missed amount is missing from every later year, too. The table under the calculator shows the salary for each year if the raise repeated.

Asking for a raise with numbers

A request lands better as a number with a reason than as a feeling. Look up the median pay for your occupation in the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook, write down what changed in your role since your pay was last set, and ask for a specific figure. If the answer is less than you hoped, this calculator turns the offer into what it means per paycheck, which is often the easier number to judge.

• Take-home pay calculator
• Hourly to salary calculator
• Pay conversion answers
• Overtime vs side hustle

Where a raise does the most

Sending all or part of a raise to debt before it is absorbed into spending is one of the fastest ways to shorten a payoff plan. Enter the extra as a monthly payment to see the new date.

• Debt payoff calculator: your debt-free date

See also: How to Negotiate a Raise.