Time card calculator

How to calculate hours worked

For each day, take the end time away from the start time, then take off any unpaid break. Doing it in 24-hour time saves most of the mistakes: a day from 7:00 am to 3:30 pm is 15:30 minus 7:00, which is 8 hours 30 minutes, and a 30-minute unpaid lunch brings it to 8 hours.

Add the days up in hours and minutes first, and only then turn the total into a decimal. Converting each day and adding the decimals works too, but rounding each one to two places can leave the week a minute or two out — which is why the calculator does its sums in whole minutes and converts once at the end.

A shift that crosses midnight is the one that trips people up, because the end time is smaller than the start. Add 24 hours to the end before subtracting: 10:00 pm to 6:30 am is 30:30 minus 22:00, or 8 hours 30 minutes. The calculator does this on its own whenever the end is earlier than the start, marks the row as overnight, and counts the shift on the day it began, the way a paper time card usually is. If an overnight shift straddles the end of your workweek, how its hours are split between the two weeks can change the overtime, so settle that with whoever runs payroll.

Converting minutes to decimal hours

Payroll multiplies hours by a rate, and you cannot multiply clock time. Divide the minutes by 60 to get the decimal: 45 minutes is 0.75 of an hour, so 7 hours 45 minutes is 7.75 hours. The mistake to watch for is writing 7.45, which is only 7 hours 27 minutes and costs the worker a quarter of an hour.

Rounded to two places. Some employers round recorded time to the nearest five minutes, tenth or quarter of an hour; the federal rules allow that only where it evens out over time rather than always favoring the employer.

Breaks and lunch

Only unpaid time comes off. Under the federal rules the Department of Labor describes, a short rest break — commonly 5 to 20 minutes — is normally counted as hours worked and paid, while a bona fide meal period, typically 30 minutes or more with the worker fully relieved of duty, normally is not. A lunch eaten in the van while waiting on a delivery is not a break from work.

Federal law does not require breaks to be given at all; a number of states do, with their own lengths and timing. The Department of Labor’s page on breaks and meal periods sets out the federal position. For what your state requires, check its labor department.

Overtime: the federal baseline, and why it is only a baseline

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, a non-exempt employee is owed at least one and a half times their regular rate for every hour over 40 in a workweek. The workweek is any fixed run of seven consecutive days — it does not have to start on a Monday — and each week stands alone, so a short week does not cancel out a long one. That is the rule the overtime switch above applies. The Department of Labor’s overtime page and Fact Sheet #23 explain it in full.

It is a floor. Some states set their own overtime rules on top — California, for instance, also counts overtime by the day — and where the state rule is more generous, that is the one that applies. Exempt salaried staff and independent contractors sit outside the federal overtime rule altogether, and the regular rate it is calculated on can include more than the base hourly wage. The calculator multiplies the rate you type in; it cannot know which of those applies to you, so treat its pay figure as a gross starting point, before tax and deductions, not as a payroll ruling.

Using it as a timesheet template

Fill in the week, add a name and the date the week starts, and press Print / save as timesheet. What prints is just the sheet: each day with its times, break and hours, the week’s total and overtime, the pay if you gave a rate, and lines for the employee and a supervisor to sign. Choose “Save as PDF” in the print dialog to keep a copy or send it from your phone.

For a blank timesheet to fill in by hand on site, clear the rows first and print. The sheet comes out with the days and columns ready and the boxes empty.

If you bill a customer by the hour, the same total is the labor line. A work order records the hours as the job happens, and the invoice templates take hours × rate as a line of their own. When the rate itself is the question, the markup calculator shows what a price leaves you once costs are covered.