Accrued Income Calculator
Accrued income is money you have already earned but have not been paid yet. For an employee it is the wages quietly building up since the last paycheck. For a bond investor it is the interest piling up between coupon payments, which the buyer has to hand to the seller at settlement. The two uses share one idea, value earned day by day before cash changes hands, and they are calculated completely differently.
The Accrued Income Calculator below handles both. Pay mode works out salary accrued since your last pay date from your annual pay, pay frequency, work schedule, overtime and bonuses, with a work-day calendar that skips weekends unless you tell it not to. Bond mode computes accrued interest from face value, coupon rate, days since the last payment and your choice of a 365-day or 360-day basis, the two bases this tool has always offered.
Bond buyers pay the seller this accrued interest on top of the quoted (clean) price. The total is the dirty price.
Quick Answer
Key takeaways
- Pay accrual on work days only: accrued pay = working days since last pay x (annual salary / (work days per week x 52)). Weekends change both the day count and the daily rate.
- Bond accrual: accrued interest = face value x coupon rate x (days accrued / day-count basis). The basis, 360 or 365 in this tool, moves the answer by about 1.4% on the same bond.
- Accrued income is the opposite of deferred income: accrued is earned but not yet received (an asset), deferred is received but not yet earned (a liability).
- The buyer of a bond pays the seller the accrued interest on top of the quoted clean price. Clean price plus accrued interest equals the dirty price actually settled.
- Quick Answer
- The formulas, step by step
- Worked example 1: $52,000 salary, 13 days into a bi-weekly period
- Worked example 2: the bond, and why the basis matters
- Accrued vs deferred, and where accrued income sits in accounting
- What competing calculators miss
- Frequently asked questions
- Add This Calculator to Your Website
- References
The formulas, step by step
Pay mode: count the days that count. The calculator counts calendar days since your last pay date, then, with weekends excluded, recounts only Monday-to-Friday days after the pay date up to today. That work-day count is what salary actually accrues on for most salaried staff.
Pay mode: build the daily and hourly rates. Daily rate = annual salary / (work days per week x 52), or salary / 365 when weekends count. Hourly rate = salary / (work days x 52 x hours per day). Overtime accrues separately at hourly rate x your multiplier, and a bonus accrues day by day across the year.
Bond mode: one multiplication, one choice. Accrued interest = face value x (coupon / 100) x (days accrued / basis). The only judgment call is the basis: 360 for the 30/360 family used by many corporate and municipal bonds, 365 for actual-day counting used by many government issues.
Worked example 1: $52,000 salary, 13 days into a bi-weekly period
Annual salary $52,000, paid bi-weekly. Last pay date October 2, 2026; today October 15, 2026; 5 work days per week, 8 hours per day, weekends excluded, no bonus or overtime. These are the pre-filled defaults in pay mode, verified against the calculator's code:
| Figure | Value |
|---|---|
| Days since last pay | 13 |
| Working days accrued (October 3 to 15, weekends skipped) | 9 |
| Daily rate ($52,000 / (5 x 52)) | $200.00 |
| Hourly rate | $25.00 |
| Accrued regular income (9 x $200.00) | $1,800.00 |
| Full bi-weekly period amount ($52,000 / 26) | $2,000.00 |
| Pay period complete (13 / 14 days) | 92.9% |
| Still to accrue | $200.00 |
| Average daily accrual ($1,800.00 / 13) | $138.46 |
| Next pay date | October 16, 2026 (1 day) |
Notice the two different day counts doing two different jobs. The money follows working days: 9 days at $200. The progress bar follows calendar days: 13 of the period's 14 days, because a bi-weekly period is two weeks on the calendar whatever the work pattern. Mixing those counts up is the classic hand-calculation error, and it is why a $200 daily rate over 13 calendar days wrongly suggests $2,600 of accrual, more than the whole period pays. If your pay arrives on a different rhythm, a per-check salary calculator breaks the same annual figure down by paycheck, and the salary plus overtime calculator extends the overtime side beyond a single period.
Worked example 2: the bond, and why the basis matters
A $10,000 face value bond with a 4% annual coupon, 73 days after its last coupon payment. On the pre-filled 365-day basis: $10,000 x 0.04 x 73 / 365 = $80.00, accruing at $1.10 a day. Flip the basis to 360 and the same bond, same days, gives $10,000 x 0.04 x 73 / 360 = $81.11. Neither answer is wrong: they belong to different bonds, because the day-count basis is written into each bond's terms.
| Convention family | Basis in this tool | Typical users | $10,000 at 4%, 73 days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Actual-day counting | 365 | Many government bonds and notes use actual days in the period and year | $80.00 |
| 30/360 family | 360 | Many U.S. corporate and municipal bonds, assuming 30-day months | $81.11 |
The honest limitation, stated plainly: professional accrued-interest calculations also need the bond's coupon frequency and the exact convention variant (30/360 U.S. vs 30E/360, actual/actual ICMA vs ISDA), because the day count itself is computed from dates under rules that adjust month-ends. This tool takes the day count as an input and applies the basis directly, which is exact once the day count is right, and is the same simplification most online tools make. For the settlement total, pair the result with a bond dirty price calculator: clean price plus this accrued figure is what actually leaves your account. The same earned-but-unpaid idea appears in property income, where an accrued rent calculator tracks rent earned before it is collected.
Accrued vs deferred, and where accrued income sits in accounting
Accrued income: earned, not yet received
- Wages earned since the last payday.
- Bond interest built up since the last coupon.
- Rent or fees earned for a period already served.
- Recorded as an asset (receivable) under accrual accounting.
Deferred income: received, not yet earned
- Subscriptions paid annually in advance.
- Deposits for work not yet performed.
- Gift cards sold but not yet redeemed.
- Recorded as a liability until the work is done.
Under accrual-basis accounting, income is recorded in the period it is earned, which is why accrued income exists on the books at all: the $1,800 in the pay example is the employer's accrued payroll liability and the employee's earned income long before payday moves cash. Cash-basis records ignore it until payment, one reason the two bases report different profits for the same business in the same month. Tax treatment generally follows the right to receive the income rather than the payment date for accrual-basis taxpayers, though individual situations vary and personal wage earners are usually taxed on a cash basis when paid.
What competing calculators miss
We checked the top-ranking pages for this search before rebuilding this page. For the accrued income keyword specifically, the striking gap is that most top results are not tools at all.
Winning move 1: both real-world uses, as actual calculators. The ranking content for this term is dominated by articles and Excel walkthroughs that explain bond accrued interest in prose, plus bond-only tools that ignore salary entirely. This page pairs both uses with working calculators, because the searcher checking wages earned since payday and the investor pricing a bond settlement share a keyword and deserve the same page to answer both properly.
Winning move 2: a real work-day calendar, overtime and bonus accrual. Simple salary accrual tools divide annual pay by 365 and multiply by calendar days, which overstates accrual for Monday-to-Friday staff by roughly 40% mid-period (13 calendar days vs 9 working days in the worked example). This calculator counts actual working days with a calendar loop, offers the calendar-day method as a deliberate choice rather than a default error, and adds overtime at a multiplier plus daily bonus accrual, with period projections no article provides.
Winning move 3: the basis choice shown, priced and explained. Bond guides name the 30/360 and actual/actual conventions but rarely show what the choice costs. Here the 360/365 switch reprices the same bond live ($80.00 vs $81.11), the worked example prices both, and the page states its own simplification honestly: day count in, basis applied, with the professional date-rule variants named so a settlement professional knows exactly what to verify elsewhere.
Frequently asked questions
Income you have earned but not yet received, such as wages earned since your last payday, interest building on a bond between payments, or rent earned but not yet collected.
They are opposites. Accrued income is earned but not yet received (an asset). Deferred income is received but not yet earned, such as a prepayment (a liability).
Multiply the face value by the annual coupon rate, then by the fraction of the year since the last payment: face value x coupon rate x (days accrued / days in year). The days-in-year figure is your bond's day-count basis, 360 or 365 in this calculator.
The clean (quoted) price plus accrued interest. When you buy a bond between coupon dates, you pay the seller the quoted price plus the interest accrued since the last payment, because you will receive the full next coupon.
Only if your employer accrues that way. Most salaried payroll accrues on work days; the calculator lets you choose either method, and the worked example shows how much the choice matters mid-period.
Generally it is taxable when you have the right to receive it, which is why accrual-basis accounting records it in the period earned. Most individual wage earners are taxed on a cash basis when paid. Tax rules vary by situation.
The basis is the year length in the accrual fraction. A 360-day basis (the 30/360 family used by many corporate bonds) accrues slightly faster per day than a 365-day actual-day basis: on the worked example bond, $81.11 vs $80.00 over 73 days. Always use the basis written into your bond's terms.
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References
- Investor.gov (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission), "Accrued Interest" glossary - the SEC investor glossary definition of interest accumulated since a bond's last payment date. Investor.gov: Accrued Interest Glossary. Accessed October 2026.
- FINRA, "Bond Basics" investor education - how bonds pay interest, quoted clean prices and settlement amounts work for individual investors. FINRA: Bond Basics. Accessed October 2026.
- Internal Revenue Service, "Publication 538: Accounting Periods and Methods" - accrual method rules for recording income in the period it is earned. IRS: Publication 538, Accounting Periods and Methods. Accessed October 2026.
- U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, "Fact Sheet 56A: Overview of the State Minimum Wage, Wage Payment and Wage Deduction Requirements" and related pay-period guidance - background on pay frequency and wages earned between paydays. U.S. Department of Labor: Wage and Hour Fact Sheets. Accessed October 2026.
- MSRB (Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board), "About Accrued Interest" education center - how accrued interest and day-count conventions apply to municipal bond trades. MSRB: Education Center. Accessed October 2026.
- TreasuryDirect (U.S. Department of the Treasury), "Treasury Notes" product pages - coupon payment schedules for Treasury notes, the actual-day issues whose interest accrues between semi-annual payments. TreasuryDirect: Treasury Notes. Accessed October 2026.