I’m American, but I think in terms of income per month. When I hear a yearly salary, I automatically divide it by 12 in my head to get an average monthly income.
Maybe that’s because my income is seasonal. I earn a lot more in some months than I do in others. I pay attention to the difference between what I earn during a month and what my expenses were for that month. It’s not until January or later that I find out how much I’d earned in the year before.
My first adult full time job paid $550/month.
It would’ve been too depressing to calculate it by the year.
No, I did not know that–I’ll look into this, thank you!
One of the benefits of going into “paper space” is that I can do my personal budgeting anywhere with my cellphone and my bank’s app. I quite literally tick off boxes of my planned/actual amounts to say that bills are paid, and handwrite (in pencil) the actuals when they’re different. The main drawback, though, is that I cannot do any data analysis without old school forensics going on; YNAB would probably help me with trendline data.
I’ll ask the wife! Thank you!
Tripler
I follow begbert’s zero-sum strategy.
I’m retired but back in the day I’ve been both salaried (usually if not always paid biweekly, IIRC) and self-employed. In neither case did I think about my income in either terms, mainly because I’m not a budget-oriented kind of guy. I see from the poll that I’m very much in the minority, and that most do think about their income, and the majority do so in annual terms. TBH, there were times when I wasn’t even sure exactly what my gross annual income was, complicated by the fact that there was usually a bonus and/or stock options, so that when my accountant came up with a final number for the year it was often a surprise! Not that the amounts were ever huge or anything, more that I just don’t do budgets well.
Now that I’m retired and my income is much more fixed and limited, I do think of it in monthly terms. As others have said, this makes sense because virtually all expenses are either monthly, or, like groceries and house taxes, can easily be reduced to monthly equivalents and compared directly with monthly income.
That is not unusual. I think most people let each category roll over and just top them up next month to whatever is needed. Some do as you do and sweep all the left overs either into the “to be budgeted” line or into some kind of slush fund and then redistribute it all at the beginning of the next month. I do a bit of each depending on the category.
Although I think of my pay as an annual figure, I also don’t know what it is until the end of the year. I have a minimum base salary, I know what that is, and use that number for my strategic budget, but I also get various allowances, overtime, etc, which are extra and get put towards savings and/or discretionary expenses in the tactical budget.
American living in Switzerland: per-year.
April is bonus month and November is the 13th month salary (link).
Biggest bills are taxes which are due in March, June, September and December. Biggest monthly bill is health insurance, as we own our place. If we were renting, our monthly rent would be about 6x the cost and then that would be our biggest monthly bill. Except for one credit card and taxes, all bills are paid automatically. We spend less than we make, and we watch our statements carefully to make sure it stays that way.
Back in Thailand most people are paid by the month, with some very low-skilled workers paid by the day. In fact, minimum wage was set at 300 baht a day at the time we left, which was close to US$10. I never heard of anyone being paid by the hour, never. But here in the US, I think of salaries as annual since so many people are paid weekly or every other week. My last boss in Thailand, a Brit at the Bangkok Post who was from Singapore, was very surprised when I told her most Americans are not paid monthly.
Day to day, I think about the net amount of my monthly paycheck. In terms of my salary, I consider my annual salary, not the monthly salary. Add in yearly savings (401[k], 529, Roth, etc.) and not monthly. Salary discussions are always in terms of annual, although our pay grade charts are monthly. Go figure.
I think on a 40 hour week, that works out to about 3.17/hour which is about what I was earning around 1974. 
Biweekly is very rare for white collar workers in the UK, where it’s normally per month. But in salary terms, we tend to think of per year. That’s how jobs are advertised.
And obviously we get paid by bank transfer, not cheque - do people still get those?
When I think of other peoples’ salaries, I think of gross per-year. When I think of my own, I think of net per-month. Mainly this is because much of my pay is tax-free, which makes it meaningless to compare to a regular gross annual salary without doing a bit of math.
I’ve noticed they still use cheques in the USA. I don’t think the rest of the world uses them anymore.
Per year. If you’re an American, you’re either by the hour, or making suchandsuch grand per year. I’m salaried but I do know more or less what I make equivalently an hour, and know exactly what I make a year, because that’s in my contract. Nobody says per month and I couldn’t tell you how much that is without doing some math. The only time I every say how much I got in a paycheck it’s to my wife. But honestly, nobody talks about that much since it’s kind of a taboo subject here.
US -
Either per-year or per-hour.
per-month is odd to me.
I may be wrong but it seems to me most of the nations consider a person’s income in terms of monthly salary.
For example, I’ve just googled “job pay in the netherlands” - one of the top results is this site, where income is expressed in monthly salaries. I don’t think it is a coincidence.
ETA: It is the second result in my search. The first one asked me to accept ads so I went to the second.
I get direct deposit, but I still think of it as a paycheck. And until this pandemic hit every two weeks I was handed an envelope containing a pay stub - which is to say, a voided paycheck printed on regular paper.
I think in both as salaries are by year but I budget by month.
I’ve just remembered that even people who receive their paycheck every two weeks are originally handed a contract where the salary is stipulated as a monthly amount and the fortnight payment stands for half this sum.
When I was a kid and heard about someone’s dad making $30,000 a year, I thought he was actually given $30,000 on January first and had to budget that for the next 364 days.