Piggy1099 vs W-2 Calculator
Comparing a contract gig with a salaried offer? Find the hourly rate that actually matches it once benefits and employer taxes are priced in.
The W-2 offer
Your contract schedule
What a W-2 offer is really worth
Why a $95,000 salary is not $45.67 an hour
Dividing a salary by 2,080 hours is the mistake that costs contractors the most money. A W-2 employer pays several things on top of your salary that a client never will: the employer half of payroll taxes (7.65% of wages for Social Security and Medicare), health insurance premiums, a retirement match, and paid time off — days you are paid for without working. As a 1099 contractor you buy all of that yourself, out of your rate.
This calculator adds those employer-side costs to the salary to get the true annual value of the offer, then divides by your realistic billable hours — not 2,080, because contractors lose time to sales, admin and gaps between projects. The result is the rate at which the two offers genuinely break even.
Paid time off is the one benefit that isn't extra money — it's already inside the salary. Counting it twice is the most common error in rate comparisons, so this calculator leaves it out of the dollar total and instead checks it against the billable weeks you entered: taking six weeks off as a contractor already funds more time off than a fifteen-day PTO policy.
One thing the math can't price: risk. Contract income stops when a client leaves, and there is no unemployment insurance behind it. Many experienced freelancers add 10–20% on top of the break-even rate to compensate — and get it, because clients are paying for flexibility.