What a company makes per second

A company with $100 million in annual revenue takes in about $3.17 every second, whether or not anyone is watching the number. That works out to $190.26 a minute, roughly $11,415 an hour, and it runs at the same pace at three in the morning as it does at three in the afternoon, because a sale does not know what time zone it landed in. Give that same company $8 million in annual profit and 400 people on payroll, and the clock also shows about 25 cents of profit kept every second, and roughly $28.54 of revenue tied to each employee for every hour they are on the clock. Enter a different company's numbers and every figure below moves with it.

The clock that never stops

The math behind the top figure is plain division. Take the annual revenue and spread it across every second in a calendar year, 31,536,000 of them (365 days times 24 hours times 3,600 seconds), not the 2,080 working hours the other calculators on this site use for a salary. A paycheck only counts hours someone is at a desk. Revenue does not work that way. A retailer's website takes orders overnight, a subscription renews on a schedule that has nothing to do with anyone's shift, and a factory in one time zone ships to a customer in another while the first plant is dark. Spreading revenue over the full calendar year, not a workweek, is what makes the per second figure honest about how a company actually earns.

A leap year adds a 366th day to the same annual total, which nudges the per second number down by about a quarter of a percent for that one year. It is small enough to ignore for almost any use, but worth knowing if a figure looks slightly off against a number from a different year.

Revenue is not profit

Revenue and profit answer two different questions, and this page keeps them apart on purpose. Revenue is everything that came in the door before a single bill got paid: payroll, rent, materials, interest, taxes. Profit, specifically net income, is what is left after every one of those bills is paid. A company can grow its revenue every year and still lose money on the bottom line, and a company with flat revenue can become far more profitable by cutting costs. The per second profit figure on this page is almost always the smaller of the two numbers, sometimes by a wide margin, and a business with a profit figure near zero or negative is telling you something the revenue number alone hides completely.

What the per-employee figure is and is not

The revenue per employee hour figure divides the company's hourly revenue by its headcount. It is a scale ratio, not a claim about how hard any one person works. It says nothing about margins, nothing about how many of those employees touch a sale directly versus keeping the lights on in finance or legal, and nothing about hours actually worked versus hours on payroll. A capital-intensive company with a small headcount and expensive equipment will show a very high number here for reasons that have nothing to do with effort, and a company that just made a large acquisition will show a number that reflects two payrolls merging before the revenue from both sides has fully combined. Treat it as a size comparison between companies, not a productivity score for any person in the building.

Finding the numbers, and where people go wrong

Both inputs come from the same place: a public company's income statement, filed as part of its annual report (the Form 10-K) and searchable for free on the SEC's EDGAR system. Revenue usually appears near the top as total revenue or net sales. Profit is net income, the very last line, not operating income or EBITDA, which both leave real costs out. Mixing up the two is the single most common way this page gets fed a misleading number.

The other common mistake is annualizing a single quarter by multiplying it by four. That works reasonably well for a company whose business is steady across the year, and works badly for one that is not: a retailer can book a third or more of its yearly revenue in the final quarter alone, so a fourth quarter times four overstates the year and a first quarter times four understates it. When a quarterly figure is all that is available, say so to yourself and treat the per second number as a rough one.

For the number that changes minute to minute in your own day, the tool at the top of this page prices a company's whole year. The live meter at dollarspersecond.com prices the meeting you are sitting in right now, at the scale of one team instead of one company.