A month has between 672 and 744 hours in total, and the average is 730. But that's rarely the number people are actually after. If you're working out pay, planning a project, or checking what your salary really works out to per hour, you want working hours, and a typical full-time month has around 160 to 184 of them.
Most people do this maths for one of two reasons: they're converting a salary into an hourly rate, or they're planning how much work a month can realistically hold. Below, we'll cover both, show you the standard figures payroll teams use, and give you the exact working hours for every month of 2026.
Calendar hours vs working hours
A calendar month contains every hour of every day, weekends and all:
- 31-day month: 744 hours
- 30-day month: 720 hours
- February 2026 (28 days): 672 hours
- Average month: 730 hours (8,760 hours in the year, divided by 12)
Working hours are a much smaller slice. They only count the hours you're contracted to work, which for most people means Monday to Friday, minus bank holidays, minus any annual leave you take. That's why a 744-hour month might only contain 152 working hours (looking at you, May).
How many working hours are in a month?
It depends on your working week. The standard figures, averaged across the year, are:
- 40-hour week: 173.33 hours per month (2,080 hours a year, divided by 12)
- 37.5-hour week: 162.5 hours per month
- 35-hour week: 151.67 hours per month
That 173.33 figure is the one payroll systems and HR teams lean on most, and it comes from the same place as the average of 21.67 working days in a month: 52 weeks of 5 days, divided by 12, multiplied by however long your working day is.
Useful as it is, 173.33 is an average, not a fact about any particular month. Real months swing from 19 working days to 23, which at 8 hours a day is a gap of 32 hours. That's four full working days of difference between the shortest month and the longest one, in the same year, on the same contract.
How to calculate it manually
To work out the hours in any specific month:
- Count the weekdays: Note how many Mondays to Fridays the month contains. It's always between 20 and 23.
- Subtract bank holidays: Only the ones that fall on a weekday, and only the ones for your nation. Bank holidays differ across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
- Multiply by your working day: 8 hours, 7.5 hours, or whatever your contract says.
- Subtract your own leave: A week off removes 37.5 to 40 hours from your personal total.
Spreadsheet fans can use Excel's NETWORKDAYS function and multiply the result by their daily hours. For one month, though, a calendar and thirty seconds of counting gets you there faster.
Converting your salary to an hourly rate
This is the calculation behind most searches for monthly hours, so let's do it properly. Take your annual salary, divide by 12, then divide by your monthly hours.
On a £30,000 salary with a 37.5-hour week:
- £30,000 ÷ 12 = £2,500 per month
- £2,500 ÷ 162.5 hours = £15.38 per hour
On a 40-hour week, the same salary works out to £14.42 per hour. Same money, different hourly rate, which is worth knowing before you compare two job offers by salary alone.
Two things to keep in mind. First, use the average (162.5 or 173.33), not the hours in whichever month you happen to be looking at, or your "hourly rate" will mysteriously drop every December. Second, if the answer comes out below £12.71, that's under the National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over (from 1 April 2026), and your employer has a legal problem. For 18 to 20 year olds the minimum is £10.85, and for 16 to 17 year olds and apprentices it's £8.00. A full-time salary at the National Living Wage on a 37.5-hour week works out to about £24,784 a year, which is a handy benchmark.
The legal ceiling
Working Time Regulations cap the working week at an average of 48 hours, measured over a 17-week reference period. Across a month, that's roughly 208 hours. Workers can opt out of the cap in writing, but nobody can be forced to, and the average matters more than any single heavy week.
The regulations also entitle you to a 20-minute rest break on any working day longer than 6 hours. Whether that break is paid depends on your contract, and if it's unpaid, it doesn't count towards your working hours. Over a month, an unpaid half-hour lunch quietly removes 10 or so hours from the paid total, which surprises more people than it should.
Working hours in every month of 2026
Here's the full breakdown for England and Wales (which share the same bank holiday dates), assuming a Monday to Friday week of 8-hour days, with the holidays that shape each month:
- January: 21 working days, 168 hours (New Year's Day falls on Thursday 1st. Scotland also has 2nd January, a Friday, making it 20 days there)
- February: 20 working days, 160 hours (No public holidays, just a short month)
- March: 22 working days, 176 hours (Nothing in England, but Northern Ireland has St Patrick's Day on Tuesday 17th, making it 21 days there)
- April: 20 working days, 160 hours (Good Friday on the 3rd and Easter Monday on the 6th. Scotland doesn't observe Easter Monday, so it's 21 days there)
- May: 19 working days, 152 hours (Early May Bank Holiday on Monday 4th and the Spring Bank Holiday on Monday 25th. The shortest working month of the year)
- June: 22 working days, 176 hours (Nothing in England or Wales, but Scotland has a one-off World Cup bank holiday on Monday 15th, the day after the men's team's opening game, making it 21 days there. Observance varies by employer, so check before you plan around it)
- July: 23 working days, 184 hours (Nothing in England. Northern Ireland has the Battle of the Boyne on Monday 13th, making it 22 days there. The longest working month of 2026)
- August: 20 working days, 160 hours (Summer Bank Holiday on Monday 31st. Scotland takes its summer holiday on Monday 3rd instead, so it's 20 days there too, just on different dates)
- September: 22 working days, 176 hours (No public holidays)
- October: 22 working days, 176 hours (No public holidays)
- November: 21 working days, 168 hours (Nothing in England. Scotland has St Andrew's Day on Monday 30th, making it 20 days there)
- December: 21 working days, 168 hours (Christmas Day on Friday 25th, and because Boxing Day lands on a Saturday, the substitute holiday is Monday 28th)
Across the whole of 2026, England and Wales have 253 working days, which is 2,024 hours on 8-hour days, or 1,897.5 hours on a 37.5-hour week. And that's before anyone takes their statutory 5.6 weeks of leave, which removes another 210 hours from a 37.5-hour contract.
Notice the swing: May gives you 152 hours and July gives you 184. If you set the same targets, the same billing forecast, or the same rota assumptions for both, one of those months is going to disappoint you.
Monthly hours and your team
The figures above tell you how many hours the calendar offers. They don't tell you how many hours your team actually has, and the two are rarely the same number.
Every approved holiday, every parental leave day, and every person on a zero-hours contract or a four-day week changes the real total. A five-person team in May doesn't have 760 working hours. It has 760 minus whatever leave got booked, and someone has to know that number before promising the month's work to anyone.
Timetasic's Rota and Time Clock app can help you plan all this ahead, and automatically.
If you are planning rota, or checking clock-ins of you team, keep reading.
That subtraction is exactly what a shared leave calendar is for. Timetastic shows you who's off and when, so the hours you plan around are the hours you actually have. And if you need to know the hours people worked rather than the hours they were scheduled for, a time clock records every clock-in and builds the timesheet for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Monthly hours come up constantly in payroll, quoting, and contract talk, so here are the quick answers.
How many hours are in a 30-day and a 31-day month?
A 30-day month has 720 hours in total, and a 31-day month has 744. February has 672 in a standard year like 2026, and 696 in a leap year.
How many working hours are there in 2026?
In England and Wales, 2026 has 253 working days once you remove weekends and the 8 bank holidays. That's 2,024 hours on 8-hour days, or 1,897.5 hours on a 37.5-hour week. Scotland and Northern Ireland both land on 251 days, thanks to their extra holidays, though they get there by different routes.
What figure should I use to convert a salary to an hourly rate?
Use the annual average for your contract: 173.33 hours a month for a 40-hour week, or 162.5 for a 37.5-hour week. Divide your monthly salary by that figure. Don't use a specific month's hours, or your rate will wobble for no real reason.
Do lunch breaks count towards monthly working hours?
Only if they're paid. You're legally entitled to a 20-minute break on any day over 6 hours, but most contracts make lunch unpaid, and unpaid breaks sit outside your working hours. Check your contract rather than your assumptions.
How many hours a month is part-time?
There's no legal definition, but anything under about 35 hours a week is generally treated as part-time. A 20-hour week is roughly 86.67 hours a month, and a 25-hour week is roughly 108.33, using the same 52-weeks-divided-by-12 method.
Did you know Timetastic now has a rota planner and clocking in and out platform, a light but complete HR system for all the basic needs of growing teams?