Your payslip shows one number. But work also costs you the time spent getting there, lunch out and the evening when you're good for nothing. Work out how much you really earn per hour of your life.
Calculated from your numbersIt works only from the numbers you enter. The default values are rough guesses; set your own under Adjust. What you enter isn't stored or sent anywhere unless you save your result yourself.
The hourly wage on your payslip only counts the hours you spend at work. But work also takes the time you spend commuting, working at home and recovering afterwards. And it costs you money for transport, eating out and clothes. Put all of that into the sum and, with the default values, an hour of your life comes out about a quarter cheaper: CZK 168 instead of 219. If you commute an hour and a quarter a day and transport costs you CZK 3,500 a month, it's a third. The idea of a “real hourly wage” comes from the book Your Money or Your Life (Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, 1992).
A lower salary can earn you more. Job A pays CZK 42,000 take-home, but the commute there and back takes 75 minutes a day and transport costs CZK 3,500 a month. That works out at CZK 166 per hour of your life. Job B pays CZK 36,000 and is a ten-minute walk away. That works out at CZK 173 an hour, and it saves you 24 hours a month as well.
The offer with CZK 6,000 less pay is actually the better one.
Next time you're choosing between two offers, work out both.
Things in hours. A CZK 22,000 phone isn't “half a month's pay”. With the default values it's about 131 hours of your life, almost 14 working days including the commute.
But don't do the sum all the time. Sanford DeVoe and Julian House of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto (2012) had people work out their hourly wage. Afterwards they enjoyed leisure time and listening to music less, and were more impatient. The result comes from a few fairly small experiments (the first had 53 students), and a close replication of the third one with two large preregistered samples (Connors et al., 2016) failed to confirm it. Treat it as a warning rather than a rule.
The calculation is useful for big decisions: a job, a car, where to live. You don't need to do it for every coffee.
Where researchers disagree. The economists Alois Stutzer and Bruno Frey (2008) found in German data that people with longer commutes are less satisfied with their lives, and higher pay doesn't make up for it. A later analysis of British data (Dickerson, Hole and Munford, 2014) found no general effect of commuting on satisfaction (only among women, and only on a different measure of well-being). The calculation in the app doesn't rely on satisfaction. It's just arithmetic: hours and money.
How it works
Hours per month: hours at work per week × 4.33 + (commute and unwinding in minutes per day) / 60 × 21.7 working days + work at home per week × 4.33. Money: take-home pay − transport − extra spent eating out − clothes. On paper: take-home pay / hours at work. In reality: money / hours per month. Taxes and contributions aren't part of it; the calculation starts from take-home pay.
The defaults are rough guides and the data are from Czechia, so amounts are in Czech crowns (CZK). You can type in your pay in any currency, as long as the costs are in the same one. CZK 38,000 is a little below the average take-home pay. According to the Czech Statistical Office, the average gross wage in Q2 2026 was CZK 51,966, which comes to about CZK 40,700 take-home (2026 rates, basic tax credit only). But high earners pull the average up, and the office isn't publishing the median at the moment. Transport CZK 1,100: in a 2024 Amazon and Ipsos survey (over 1,000 respondents in Czechia and Slovakia), Czech workers spent an average of CZK 1,126 a month getting to work. A 40-minute daily commute: the European Survey on Working Conditions of 2001–2002 measured an average of 42 minutes a day in Czechia; we didn't find a more recent national figure. Food, clothes, unwinding and work at home are estimates; set them to match your life.
Two offers differ in pay, commute and transport costs; everything else comes from the Adjust panel. What it costs: price / real hourly wage. A working day = all the hours work takes up in a month, divided by 21.7.
Nothing is saved or sent. The share card is created right in your browser and shows no monthly amounts, only the hourly wages and the percentage.
Sources
- Dominguez, J., Robin, V. (1992). Your Money or Your Life. Viking. Chapter 2, “real hourly wage”.
- Czech Statistical Office: Average wages, Q2 2026 (in Czech)
- Amazon and Ipsos: survey on commuting to work, 2024 (in Czech)
- DeVoe, S. E., House, J. (2012). Time, money, and happiness: How does putting a price on time affect our ability to smell the roses? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(2), 466–474. DOI 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.11.012, summary: BPS Research Digest
- Stutzer, A., Frey, B. S. (2008). Stress that Doesn't Pay: The Commuting Paradox. Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 110(2), 339–366. Figure 1: average daily commuting time in Europe (European Survey on Working Conditions 2000–2002).
- Dickerson, A., Hole, A. R., Munford, L. A. (2014). The relationship between well-being and commuting revisited: Does the choice of methodology matter? Regional Science and Urban Economics, 49, 321–329.
- Connors, S., Khamitov, M., Moroz, S., Campbell, L., Henderson, C. (2016). Time, money, and happiness: Does putting a price on time affect our ability to smell the roses? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 67, 60–64.
