Effective hourly wage for owner-operators.

How this calculator works (the same math nouz uses)

Your effective hourly wage answers a question a payslip answers for every employee but nobody answers for the owner: for each hour you actually put in, how much money ends up being yours? The calculator takes the profit your shop produces in a month — EBIT, what's left after every single cost — and divides it by the real hours you worked to produce it. That's the whole idea. It's the same monthly profit figure nouz tracks for you automatically, so the only number you have to be honest about is your hours.

Monthly hours = weekly hours × 4.33
Effective hourly wage = monthly profit (EBIT) ÷ monthly hours

The 4.33 is the true average number of weeks in a month (52 ÷ 12), which is why it beats a flat "4" — using 4 quietly inflates your wage by about 8%.

A worked example

Take the defaults: €2,400 of monthly profit and a 65-hour working week. First, monthly hours: 65 × 4.33 = 281.45. Then the wage: 2,400 ÷ 281.45 = €8.53 per hour. Set against an €18/hour employed alternative, that's a gap of about €9.47 an hour — roughly €2,660 a month you're leaving on the table for the privilege of being your own boss. The point isn't to feel bad. It's that seeing the shortfall as euros-per-hour, rather than as one blurry lump at year end, is what actually makes an owner change something.

What a healthy number looks like

An owner who is genuinely paying themselves should, once the shop is established, clear at least the going employed rate for comparable skilled work in their area — for most shopkeepers that means comfortably above €15–€20 an hour after two or three years. Being below that in year one is completely normal and is often a deliberate investment in building the business. But if you're several years in and still earning less per hour than you'd pay a junior employee, the business is subsidising your job rather than the other way round. Treat these as rules of thumb, not hard lines — and watch the trend more than any single month. A healthy number is one that climbs each quarter.

Common mistakes

• Counting only shop-floor hours. The evenings reconciling, the weekend ordering, supplier calls, payroll and social posts are all work. Most owners undercount their real hours by 30–40%, which flatters the wage.
• Using revenue or gross profit instead of EBIT. Only the money left after every cost is actually yours to divide. Revenue is not your wage.
• Double-counting your own draw. Decide once whether your salary sits inside EBIT or on top of it, then keep that convention every time so months stay comparable.
• Comparing to a fantasy wage. Use what you could realistically earn in a nearby job, not an aspirational figure — otherwise the gap tells you nothing useful.

When to use it — and what's next

Run this once a quarter, not once a year at tax time. If the number stings, notice that the fix is rarely "work more hours" — that only pushes the wage down. The real levers are raising prices and cutting your lowest-value hours. To move the numerator, you have to see profit as it happens, so pair this with a daily profit and loss template and watch your monthly EBIT climb week by week. Then sanity-check the cost side with the operating expense ratio calculator. Nouz shows you that profit the same day you earn it, so your hourly wage stops being a once-a-year shock and becomes a number you steer.