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Time Is Money: Americans Say Their Time Is Worth $240 an Hour, on Average
By Pete Grieve MONEY RESEARCH COLLECTIVE
Gen Z and millennials put the highest dollar value on their time.
Americans consider their time to be extremely valuable: On average, they think it’s worth $240 per hour.
Survey data from Empower, a financial planning company, shows that there’s a huge gap between what workers actually earn and what they feel they deserve.
“Based on this study’s findings of how Americans value their time, two hours of meetings at work cost close to $500 per person,” Empower said in a report.
Based on their valuations of an hour of time, Americans think they should make $499,200 per year — assuming a 40-hour work week. (For comparison, the average salary is $59,384.)
If people earned what they say they are worth, many would elect to work fewer hours per week. The survey found that 44% of respondents want to work part-time but cannot to afford to do so.
How much each generation thinks their time is worth
On the high end of the spectrum, a surprisingly large number of people think their time is worth over $500 per hour. That’s especially true for millennials (people born between 1981 and 1996) — 1 in 4 of whom put the value of their time above $500.
Only 6% of baby boomers (people born between 1946 and 1964) say they’re worth that much per hour, according to the Empower survey, which was conducted by Morning Consult.
In general, younger Americans place the highest value on their time. Here’s how much people think an hour of their time is worth, by generation:
- Gen Z: $266.92 per hour
- Millennials: $328.84 per hour
- Gen X: $215.90 per hour
- Boomers: $137.19 per hour
For the record, the federal minimum wage remains stuck at $7.25 per hour, and the average hourly wage for all workers is about $27, according to ZipRecruiter.
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Pete Grieve is a New York-based reporter who covers personal finance news. At Money, Pete covers trending stories that affect Americans’ wallets on topics including car buying, insurance, housing, credit cards, retirement and taxes. He studied political science and photography at the University of Chicago, where he was editor-in-chief of The Chicago Maroon. Pete began his career as a professional journalist in 2019. Prior to joining Money, he was a health reporter for Spectrum News in Ohio, where he wrote digital stories and appeared on TV to provide coverage to a statewide audience. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Sun-Times and CNN Politics. Pete received extensive journalism training through Report for America, a nonprofit organization that places reporters in newsrooms to cover underreported issues and communities, and he attended the annual Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in 2021. Pete has discussed his reporting in interviews with outlets including the Columbia Journalism Review and WBEZ (Chicago's NPR station). He’s been a panelist at the Chicago Headline Club’s FOIA Fest and he received the Institute on Political Journalism’s $2,500 Award for Excellence in Collegiate Reporting in 2017. An essay he wrote for Grey City magazine was published in a 2020 book, Remembering J. Z. Smith: A Career and its Consequence.