Salary Increase Calculator

A salary increase is your current pay multiplied by one plus the raise percentage.

New pay = current pay × (1 + raise % ÷ 100)

Raise % = (new pay − current pay) ÷ current pay × 100

The first formula answers “what will I earn after a 4% raise?” The second answers “what percentage is this new number?”, which is the question when an offer or a review gives you a figure instead of a rate. The calculator runs whichever one you pick with the By percentage and By new pay buttons. Hourly pay converts to yearly pay at your weekly hours times 52, so the same raise can be read either way.

A 4% raise on $60,000 is $2,400 a year, or $92.31 a paycheck.

Those are the numbers the calculator opens with. Multiply $60,000 by 1.04 and the new pay is $62,400. The rest is division:

• Per month: $2,400 ÷ 12 = $200
• Per biweekly paycheck: $2,400 ÷ 26 = $92.31
• Per hour at 40 hours a week: $60,000 ÷ 2,080 = $28.85 before, and $62,400 ÷ 2,080 = $30.00 after

The per-paycheck figure is the one to sanity check against. A raise that sounds large as a yearly number can be modest per paycheck, and all of these are gross amounts: what reaches your bank account rises by less once tax and deductions come out.

Prices rose 3.7% in the 12 months to September 2026, so the raise alone tells half the story.

That figure is the all items Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on October 14, 2026. It is the default in the inflation field, and you can change it. What matters for your pay is the real raise: how much more your new pay buys, after prices have moved.

Real raise = (1 + raise) ÷ (1 + inflation) − 1

On the worked example, 1.04 ÷ 1.037 − 1 is a real raise of 0.3%: the $62,400 buys about $174 more a year than $60,000 does at today's prices. A 3% raise on the same pay works out to 1.03 ÷ 1.037 − 1, a real change of −0.7%, and the new pay buys about $405 less. That is a raise on paper and a pay cut in what it buys, which is why the calculator labels every result as ahead of, level with or behind inflation.

Private industry wages and salaries rose 3.1% in the year to June 2026.

Inflation tells you whether your raise keeps up with prices. The Employment Cost Index tells you whether it keeps up with pay. The BLS describes the index as measuring the change in the cost of labor, free from the influence of employment shifts among occupations and industries, which makes it a fair yardstick for a raise in the same job. In its June 2026 release, wages and salaries for private industry workers rose 3.1% over 12 months, and the same release reports that inflation-adjusted wages and salaries for those workers decreased 0.4% over the year.

Put the three numbers side by side and the worked example sits just above both: 4% against 3.7% for prices and 3.1% for private industry pay. The two BLS figures cover different 12-month windows, so read them as a frame for a conversation, not as a target to the decimal.

Raises compound, so one percentage point grows every year you stay.

Each raise is a percentage of a salary that already includes the last one. Start two people at $60,000, give one 3% a year and the other 4% a year, and the gap is $600 after the first year and $3,443 after the fifth. Added up over the five years, the 4% path pays $9,874 more. The difference between an average raise and a good one is small in any one year and large over a job, which is the strongest argument for negotiating the percentage rather than accepting the first figure.

The same formula compares a new offer with your current pay.

Choose By new pay, enter what you earn now and what you have been offered, and the result is the offer expressed as a raise. An offer of $66,000 against $60,000 is a 10% raise, $6,000 a year and $230.77 a paycheck, before you weigh anything that isn't salary. If you are deciding whether to move at all, the should I quit my job quiz separates how much the job is pushing you out from whether you are ready to leave. If you are about to resign and expect a counteroffer, the counteroffer guide explains why a matching raise fixes pay and usually nothing else.

For managers, the same arithmetic prices a raise against a replacement.

The same arithmetic works from the other side of the desk. A raise for someone already doing the job well is a known, small number per paycheck. Losing that person brings recruiting, ramp-up time and lost output, which the turnover cost calculator adds up for your own team. The harder part is timing: by the time someone brings you a competing offer, the raise conversation has become a counteroffer. TeamPredict reads public LinkedIn signals to flag resignation risk early, so the pay conversation can happen while it is still a review rather than a rescue. For the wider picture, see the definition of employee retention and how it is measured.