Why when you are asked about your salary you say ” I make 60k or so” while you are getting paid monthly? Is it because of the tax system?

44 comments

1. Most people do not get paid monthly, the most common pay periods are every two weeks or on the 15th and the last day of the month.

   People give their annual salaries because that’s just how it’s done here, I don’t see how that’s any more arbitrary or less sensible than giving your monthly pay.

2. Most of us don’t say monthly. We would say our annual.

   Most people get paid bi-weekly, though getting paid daily, weekly, or monthly isn’t unheard of.

   I would be seriously surprised if our country is the only country in the world with an income tax.

   We would say our monthly rent because its paid once a month and its a fixed cost.

3. Some people don’t make the same amount every month. Sometimes you get bonuses, commission, multiple streams of income, etc. It’s just easier to standardize by yearly income because that gives you a better idea of their income bracket.

4. It’s how jobs are advertised. Salaried jobs typically are stated as the yearly amount. Commission based jobs typically will advertise the weekly or monthly expectation, and an hourly paid job will give the hourly rate. For comparisons, most people just go by the yearly total.
   It’s cultural, not tax driven thing.

5. I think only one job, out of many, paid monthly. Every other one was either weekly, biweekly, or semi-monthly.

6. I am self employed, I get paid by the job not on some fixed schedule. One month I could make a hundred grand then not make shit for 3 months. Hell just had a bobcat T550 get stolen near Pueblo Colorado a couple weeks ago, not exactly easy to calculate my monthly pay

7. Salaried employees are paid biweekly or twice monthly most commonly. But there are jobs that pay weekly or monthly. And then there’s bonuses and commissions, they’re sometimes paid out quarterly or annually. And various forms of equity grants usually vest annually. Given the wide range of pay periods, it makes to standardize to the annual time frame. Additionally, yes, because taxes are calculated on a calendar year basis, we do often have the annual number on hand.

8. My contract with my employer stipulates that I get paid $______ per year… So that’s how I express it.

   I also get a perdiem/stipend/subsistence when I’m on the road which is laid out in my contract per day. When asked, that’s how I express that amount.

9. Rent is consistent and must be paid on the same day every month.

   Pay is inconsistent for many, and isn’t paid on a monthly basis.

10. It’s just the most common convention so everybody sticks to it. Some places pay weekly, monthly, every two weeks, or twice a month. It would be hard to compare salaries if they were listed in other ways. Also it’s way easier to convert from yearly to monthly or bi-weekly than it is to convert from biweekly to monthly since there are not a whole number of weeks per month. With Yearly salary it’s easy. Get paid twice a month? Divide by 24. Get paid every two weeks? Divide by 26.

11. partially because what tax bracket you fall in depends on your yearly income.

    If you make 15k a month for 12 months, that’s a fair amount of money and you are going to owe a lot of taxes.

    If you make 15k a month for one month, you don’t owe any taxes and the government will refund you what you paid that first month.

    but as others said.
    No matter how you state it, it is arbitrary and no one method is inherently better or worse than the other.

12. Salaried workers most often get paid every other week, not monthly. It’s much simpler for us to say our annual salary instead of dividing our annual salary by 12 in our heads.

13. In some jobs I got paid every other Friday. In another it was twice per month. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten paid monthly, although some companies have that system. But in addition to my standard salary, there were also bonuses twice per year at the job I had the longest. Some people get commissions paid periodically, separate from their regular paycheck. Or other profit sharing/dividend payouts that may be a significant portion of their total pay. Rather than specify all the details of how much and how often, it’s easier to just give an annual total.

14. Definition of the word salary in American English

    > a fixed regular payment, typically paid on a monthly or biweekly basis but often **expressed as an annual sum**, made by an employer to an employee

    It’s a convention that pre-dates most of us. Salaries are listed as annual and people generally know this figure more than what they receive every pay period. This is especially true in modern times when the majority of people get paid by direct deposit and don’t even look at a check to see the amount. They would only see the post tax amount deposited into their account which isn’t the “gross” calculation that a salary is.

15. I suppose because salaried jobs are advertised as annual salary and not monthly.

    Why do we do that? Well, no real reason in particular I suppose. It’s all just arbitrary. It’s not like you could tell me why you tell people you make $X a month instead of $X a year.

16. I don’t know why we do it. I don’t know why non-Americans don’t.

    Our salary is yearly (unless it’s hourly). Rent is monthly.

17. Because it allows you to compare different types of payment by with a common denominator.

    Salaried are generally paid based on annual wages, i.e. when the offer comes it says you’ll make 100,000 a year. Contract employees are typically paid by the hour as opposed to a flat rate, i.e. the contract says you’ll make 50/hour. The difference (aside from taxes and benefits) is that the contractor can typically work more if he works more than 40 hours per week. Lastly, hourly employees are just that, hourly. Their offer would be something like 40/hr plus time and a half for anything over 40 hours or on holidays. A person working 50 hours a week might then say their annual rate is 110k per year, which would be accurate, even though their hourly wage is set at $40. So in that scenario, you have someone making $40 an hour making more than someone who makes 100k per year, even though the hourly rate for $40 would be about 80k based on straight-time.

    TL;DR: it gives a common means to compare wages across jobs when the pay is not necessarily standardized as to hourly vs salaried vs contract.

18. Some people are paid monthly and some are hourly. And hours worked can vary widely by season in some sectors. Then there might be tips, commissions, or bonuses on top of the base rate. The yearly figure is easiest for comparisons.

19. I get paid every other week. This means some months I get three paychecks. Also, my pay is slightly different from paycheck to paycheck – sometimes this is related to the taxes being taken out, sometimes it’s related to money I’m voluntarily taking out for my retirement, or shifts in my healthcare premium, etc. This is all nebulous enough that it’s way easier to just say I make X per year, rather than doing the math to figure out what my “usual” monthly or bi-weekly take-home pay is. If you pushed me, I could tell you what my most recent paycheck was.

    And, because our tax system is not *super* straightforward, most people in the US do not bother qualifying this by specifying how much in tax is taken out. Often because people don’t even really know with great specificity. Most people just understand, on an informal basis, that “I make $100,000 per year” means I am actually taking home somewhere between $55-75K per year depending on all those other factors like my exact tax rate, my voluntary withholding, etc.

    The other way people tend to refer to their pay is by how much they make hourly, since many jobs define themselves that way and people who work in those jobs can often (not always) work different numbers of hours from week to week.

    Those are the two ways we talk about it; generally not weekly or monthly or paycheck-by-paycheck.

20. Tax returns are filed annually so it’s just sort of based on that

21. In much of the world compensation is paid on a monthly basis. That is not the most common pay frequency in the US.

    Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, employers are required to track hours worked and calculate overtime on a weekly basis. For employees who are not covered by FLSA, there is still a weekly salary basis. There are also varying state laws on how frequently employees should be paid.

    In the US there are a variety of payroll frequencies. Some are paid weekly or bi-weekly. There are others paid semi-monthly or monthly. So, annual salaries are the most common comparison. Our federal & state taxes are also submitted annually, which includes the annual compensation total. As a result, annual salary amounts are the easiest to use for comparison.

    ETA: Many jobs (but not all) have bonus pay as well and that amount is included in the annual amount.

22. The flip side of this question, why on earth do Europeans quote their athletes salaries as “he makes 50k pounds a week”. It is impossible for us Americans who think in terms of annual incomes how much that really is except “way more than what I make”. In the US we quote our salaries as annual salaries.

    I’m not sure why this is. I know for me, I’m salaried (which means I get paid fixed amount no matter what hours I work, this is opposed to hourly), so my income is set based on a yearly amount, then my income is divided into equally into 24 paychecks (two a month).

    I get bonuses too. In practice though, if someone was to ask me how much I make I wouldn’t include bonuses because those could be nothing per year or a lot, it just depends.

    Keep in mind it’s considered very impolite to ask what someone makes in the US. It’s something you might talk about amongst very good friends and family (and even then I would not talk about it to my poorer side of the family). With the said, I’ve certainly been asked how much I make and it’s almost always by very insecure (read: douchebags) middle class types who are trying to size you up compared to them.

23. People refer to annual numbers because we think about salary in annual terms because that’s how it’s shared when you accept a job offer, I would imagine.

24. No idea, but with how much my paycheck varies it’s more convenient to say I make 53,000 before OT.

25. Because when people ask about your income (banks, would-be employers) they want to know the yearly figure.

26. I get paid by the day. It’s best if everyone just uses the same “yearly” as a quantifier.

    Example: day rate × 182= salary

27. We are more ok with our rent/day fluctuating from month to month than our pay/day.

    If you’re paid every two weeks (like most salaried employees), you get three paychecks two months out of the year. This makes discussing monthly pay a bit confusing.

    At the same time, most people wouldn’t accept spreading those two extra paychecks out over the course of the year to get paid on the 1st and 15th, but we are completely fine doing the same thing with rent/mortgage payments.

    All of that aside, it’s really just an issue of culture. All of us have been discussing these things in these terms all of our lives. What matters more than anything is having a common way of viewing these things.

    [edit – alternatively landlords/mortgage agencies like to advertise a smaller number whereas employers like to advertise a larger number]

28. Because that’s generally what we mean when we say salary in American English, gross annual income. If we wanted to know what someone makes in a month or a week or whatever we would ask that specifically. You’d probably need an etymologist to explain why but we’re not making a conscious choice not to answer with a monthly amount, that’s just how we talk about “salary”. Just one of those things where there isn’t a perfect translation.

    And of course, answers for specific time periods are often more complicated from things like commission, overtime, figuring out if you mean before or after optional deductions like retirement or insurance, etc…

29. It’s a good denominator for most people. Paydays aren’t particularly standardized, some folks are paid every 2 weeks, others are paid every week, every other week, on the 15th and 30th, every day, monthly, upon delivery, or at the end of a project. The way this varus is pretty huge, and a monthly salary is harder to pin down as an average. A yearly amount makes more sense, and is a lot easier to compare side by side.

    Rent and mortgage payments are almost always charged monthly. Therefore it is easy to compare rent prices side by side on a monthly basis.

30. According to the [Bureau of Labor Statistics](https://www.bls.gov/ces/publications/length-pay-period.htm) less than 5% of American workers are paid monthly. The vast majority are paid weekly, biweekly, or semimonthly.

31. Other than food service jobs as a teenager, I’ve never had a job that quoted monthly or even hourly salary. I get offered an annual salary. If I want to know how much I make per month or per hour, I can figure it out for myself, but that’s just not the way our professional jobs tend to approach money.

32. People get paid at different frequencies. For those that are bi-weekly, they get a slightly lower amount for 10 months of the year and a higher amount for two months. Those paid twice a month have it consistent throughout.

    People also get paid on top of their base salaries that they get each month, so the monthly isn’t fully representative of their total comp. Some people get bonuses, commissions, or stocks as a substantial part of their annual pay (up to 50% or more sometimes). These can be paid monthly, quarterly, annually, or some other random frequency.

33. When I accepted my last job, I was told I’d be paid $XX,XXX a year. My company paid us every two weeks meaning we got paid 26 times a year. I didn’t feel like dividing by 12 to give someone a monthly rate.

    The salary I was quoted and would tell someone was pre-tax as the net amount depended on many variables including the number of deductions you claimed. If you were single and didn’t have lots of deductions for a mortgage, you’d probably have one deduction, whereas if you were married and had a couple of kids as well as a lot of deductions for things like mortgage interest you might claim 6 or 7 and have a larger take-home.

34. I say annual when talking about gross but monthly when talking about net.

35. Most of us don’t get paid monthly. It’s exceedingly rare to get paid monthly. Most people get paid twice a month, so we’d have to mentally do the math real quick and double our paychecks (which can vary depending on state taxes, your general federal tax bracket, anything taken out for 401k or other insurance or benefits packages your job offers, etc). Or if you’re paid weekly or daily that’s just even more unnecessary math.

    Salaried jobs are advertised as “$67,500 a year”, or whatever. So that’s what I would tell people I make. I don’t feel like dividing 67,500 by 12 in my head. And what I have taken out for state taxes and 401k isn’t going to be the same as many other people, so taking my bi-monthly paycheck and doubling it isn’t going to give as accurate a picture as “67.5k” would.

36. Who says we get paid monthly?

37. People don’t have the same monthly amount and can be dependent on hours worked. Salary is discussed yearly and hourly jobs are discussed… hourly. And people don’t get paid by the month and get taxed at different rates

38. Salaries, tax rate are annual figures.

39. We don’t have a standardized pay frequency– most Americans are paid biweekly (every two weeks), some are paid semimonthly (1st and 15th of the month), some are paid monthly or quarterly.

40. Most of us not on salary get paid every two weeks. Very few Americans in the US who work for American companies get paid monthly.

    That’s just weird.

41. Salary is generally describing yearly/annual income. Most folks understand that, even if they aren’t salaried employees, or asking about the question is fine. Along with how, a lot of people would describe their salary in terms of what their pay rate is before taxes – or otherwise, respond to the question with “my salary is 60k, but my take home is around 50k” – which would imply that 10k of it disappears into taxes.

    How often we get paid is not standardized. There’s a lot of jobs that pay weekly and bi-weekly. There’s jobs that pay monthly or quarterly. It’s up to the company to figure that out, and employees to understand the policy. For salary jobs, this usually swings toward biweekly or monthly – it’s more common for blue collar/non-salary jobs to be weekly or biweekly. Quarterly is *very* uncommon, and my only experience with it is working out dividends from stocks (stocks that themselves only pay out quarterly).

42. Some people are paid weekly, some every 2 weeks and some once a month. Saying the yearly salary puts it in something everyone can easily get without a big explanation of how frequently they get paid.

    Rent and other bills are commonly paid monthly so that is what makes sense to say.

43. We almost always state our *annual* salary, not monthly. It has nothing to do with taxes.

    I work in sales. A huge portion of my salary is distributed twice a year – in March and December. There are some sales jobs that distribute commissions quarterly. Some distribute monthly, but that doesn’t mean the commissions they earn are consistent…. Bottom line is, there is no “typical” monthly salary. It can vary, it can be cyclical, or it can be distributed at specific times each year. There is no “monthly salary” to speak of, at all for many salespeople.

    Rent is different. It’s collected every month and it’s the same amount, per your lease agreement. Expenses in general are assessed monthly, by the township, by the bank that owns your mortgage, and by utility companies. Expenses are what they are. But with salary the best you can do is total it up for the year.

44. Not everyone gets paid the same amount throughout the year.