How Many Work Hours In A Year

On average, there are 2080 work hours in a year and can be up to 2096 hours.

Knowing how many hours you work can help you calculate your potential salary when looking for a new job. Let’s say that you see a job listing that shows a wage of $15 per hour. Well… $15 an hour is how much a year? By knowing the hours in a work year, you can easily calculate this. 

Hours Worked In A Year

The general understanding is that there are 52 weeks in a year and the average full-time employee works 40 hours a week. From this, you can calculate that there are 2080 work hours in a year (52 weeks x 40 hours). Estimating in this same way, the number of workdays in a year is 260 days (52 weeks x 5 weekdays).

• Weeks in a year: 52
• Number of workdays in a year: 260
• Hours in a work year: 2080

However… that is only an estimate. There are actually 52.143 weeks in a year (365/ 7) and 52.286 in a leap year (366/ 7). In reality, there are anywhere from 260 to 262 workdays per year and 2080 to 2096 work hours.

As an example, let’s take a look at the year 2023.

Workdays & Work Hours for 2023

For 2023, there are a total of 260 days and 2080 hours in the work year. As you can see, there are also 160 to 184 work hours per month.

Month	# of Work Days	# of Work Hours
January	22 days	176 hours
February	20 days	160 hours
March	23 days	184 hours
April	20 days	160 hours
May	23 days	184 hours
June	22 days	176 hours
July	21 days	168 hours
August	23 days	184 hours
September	21 days	168 hours
October	22 days	176 hours
November	22 days	176 hours
December	21 days	168 hours
Total	260 days	2080 hours

Do you feel this is getting a bit too complicated? Me too. Unless you want to calculate the actual hours you’ll be working for each and every year, I just like to stick with the general consensus of 2080 hours.

Actual Hours Worked Per Year

Did you realize we forgot something? We did! Remember that some full-time employees also get the benefit of paid holidays, paid time off (PTO), and sick time.

Let’s say that you receive:

• 10 Paid Federal holidays (80 hours)
• 80 Hours PTO

2080 hours – 80 – 80 = 1920

That would mean that you get paid for about 2080 hours, but the actual hours worked in a year are 1,920.

Also, while you could technically be working all 52 weeks, there are 48-50 work weeks in a year. This is if you work for a business that gives time off for federal holidays and the typical 2 weeks vacation.

Another thing to question is how often you get paid. Depending on how often your company does payroll, there are 12 to 52 pay periods in a year.

How Many Hours Are In A Year?

I was sitting down one day after calculating the work hours in a year and started to realize just how much our jobs rob the time from our lives. We have a total of 365 days in a year, so that’s about 8,760 hours in a year. But how much do we actually have outside of working and sleeping?

I wanted to calculate how much free time I actually have after work. So here’s what I did:

• About 260 workdays x 11 hours per day (+3hrs to include getting dressed, the commute, and 1 hour lunch break) = 2860 hours taken by work
• Hopefully sleeping 8 hours per day x 365 days per year = 2920 for sleeping

8,760 hours per year – 2860 work hours – 2920 sleeping hours = 2980 hours to ourselves per year.

So from all of these calculations, I realized just how valuable our time really is. If we’re lucky, we have about 2980 hours per year to do what we want. That doesn’t even include the time taken up by cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, and the millions of other tasks that have to be accomplished. So use your time to enjoy life and take care of your well-being.

And we can’t end this post without talking about ways to stack your dollars!

Realizing how many hours are spent working can also help you save money. For instance, I think about some things by the amount of time I have to work to pay for them. If you get paid $15 an hour, that Birkin bag isn’t $11,000, it’s 733 hours of your life. That $40 meal at the restaurant is about 2.6 hours of work. That makes you stop and think before purchasing something, doesn’t it?

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