What It Costs to Go to Work

Your salary is not what arrives, but what is left after the costs that would not exist without this job.

Take the last month and list everything that exists only because of the job: the travel pass or the fuel and parking, lunches and coffee, work clothes and cleaning them, the childcare hours you would not otherwise need, the taxi on days when you are wrung out. Then add the hours: the commute both ways, getting ready, evening emails, work talk at the weekend — that is time the job takes too. Subtract the money from your net pay and add the hours to your working hours. Divide one by the other to get your real hourly rate. Compare it with the one written in your contract and note the difference in a single line.

The gap is usually big enough that your first instinct will be to recalculate — do recalculate, but do not fudge it. After that there are only two honest moves: cut some of the costs (lunch from home, a different route, no taxi) or demand more per hour; that choice is yours, not the spreadsheet's. If you could not gather the numbers because spending is smeared across the card, take one week and log everything — that is enough to multiply by four. And do not show the result to colleagues as a complaint: it is useful as an argument in a conversation about money, not as material for a collective sigh in the kitchen.