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How much is social media costing you in time?

Type your weekly hours and rate. See the year in dollars, workdays and weekends.

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Hours a week on each job

The starting hours are placeholders, not a survey average. Move them to your week.

1 h
1.5 h
1.5 h
0.5 h
1 h

Social media costs you

264hours a year

worth $7,920 of your time, or $660 a month.

workdays
33
workdays8 hours each
weekends
17
weekendstwo 8-hour days
vacation weeks
6.6
vacation weeks40 hours each

Each dot is one 40-hour week. Social media takes 6.6 of your 52, about 13% of the year.

For 13 posts a month on 2 platforms, with replies, small agencies in the US publish packages from $500 to $1,550, typically about $1,350 a month.

Compare with agency prices

The math, in one line

Hours a week, times the weeks you work, is your hours a year. Times what an hour of your time is worth, that is the money. A workday here is 8 hours, a weekend is 16 hours (two of those days), and a week of vacation is 40 hours. Each dot in the year grid is one 40-hour week.

The page starts at 5.5 hours a week over 48 weeks. Those are placeholders to move, not an average: we did not find a recent independent survey of how many hours small business owners spend, and we will not invent one.

Count the hours you forget

Most people only count the time with the app open. The real week also has the hunt for an idea on Sunday night, the photo that needed a retake, the caption rewritten three times and the replies answered from the checkout line. Put those in too, then the number is yours.

Not sure? Track one normal week: a note on your phone each time you open an app for the business. One week of notes beats any guess.

What the hours buy elsewhere

The comparison under your result uses the social media management pricing tool: the published packages from small agencies in your country that are closest to your posts a week. It covers the US, the UK, Australia and Canada. In other currencies the link still works, without the number.

Questions people ask

How do you work out what social media time costs?

Add up your hours a week on social media, multiply by the weeks you work in a year, then by what an hour of your time is worth. Five hours a week for 48 weeks is 240 hours. At $30 an hour that is $7,200 a year. This page also turns the hours into 8-hour workdays and 16-hour weekends.

How much time do small business owners spend on social media?

We could not find a recent, independent survey that measures the average hours, so the starting numbers on this page are placeholders, not an average. What surveys do show is who does the work: in Constant Contact's Small Business Now report (Q2 2026, more than 5,000 owners and consumers), 47% of small business owners handle all of their social media themselves. In a Talker Research survey of 1,000 US owners for Adobe Express (May 2026), 41% said they act as their own social media manager.

What hourly rate should I use for my own time?

Use what you would bill a customer for an hour, or what you would pay someone else to do the work. If you are not sure, a freelance social media manager is a fair floor: Upwork puts typical US rates at $25 to $50 an hour.

Is it cheaper to hire someone than to do it myself?

Compare the yearly number here with the published prices on the social media management pricing page. If your time costs more than a freelancer or a small agency package for the same posts, handing it off pays. If it costs less, keeping it in house can make sense.

Do you save the numbers I enter?

No. The math runs in your browser. If you copy the link, the numbers (hours, rate, weeks, currency) go into the address so the result opens the same way. Nothing else is stored or sent.

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