Timesheet Calculator

What this calculator answers

How many hours you worked in a week or two, from each day’s start and end time minus any unpaid break, and how many of those hours are overtime under the rules you enter. You get each day’s hours in hours and minutes and in decimal hours, the week’s total, the regular and overtime split, and gross pay if you add your hourly rate. Shifts that end after midnight, two-week pay periods and time clocks that round are handled, and every step is shown so you can check a pay stub or fill in a time card.

How to use it

• Timesheet covers: one or two weeks. Each week is a separate workweek for overtime.
• Workweek starts on: Monday or Sunday, whichever day your employer’s workweek begins. The days are then listed in the order you worked them, which decides which days carry weekly overtime. The totals are the same either way.
• Start, end and break for each day: type times the quick way — 9, 9a, 930, 5:30pm or 17:30 — and check the line under the box that says how it was read. A number without am or pm is a 24-hour time, so 5 is 5:00 AM. An end at or before the start is on the next day. The break is the unpaid time in minutes, 30, or in hours and minutes, 0:45. Leave days off blank.
• Tue–Fri same as Monday fills Tuesday to Friday from Monday and keeps them in step until you change one of them. With two weeks, Week 2 same as week 1 does the same for the second week.
• Weekly overtime after, Daily overtime after, Double time after: the thresholds in hours from your employer or state rules. Leave blank the ones that don’t apply to you.
• Round clock times: only if your employer’s time clock rounds.
• Hourly rate (optional) adds gross pay; Overtime multiplier is 1.5 unless you enter another.
• Show times as: 12-hour or 24-hour.

Results update as you type. The Try buttons load a week of night shifts from 10:00 PM to 6:30 AM, a two-week period of 44 hours and then 36, and four 10-hour days under a daily overtime rule, each explained in a section below. The table of hours by day downloads as a CSV file and prints with the page, with no sign-up. To compare two versions of a week, such as with and without a daily overtime rule, press Save for comparison before and after the change.

How to calculate hours worked from start and end times

Subtract the start time from the end time, then take off the unpaid break. If the end time is at or before the start time, the shift ended the next day, so add 24 hours to the end first.

• $t_{\text{start}}$ and $t_{\text{end}}$ are clock times in hours and minutes.
• $b$ is the unpaid break.
• The result is in hours and minutes. For payroll, convert the minutes to a decimal by dividing by 60: 8:45 is 8 + 45 ÷ 60 = 8.75 hours.

Subtract minutes from minutes, borrowing 60 when needed: 5:15 PM − 8:45 AM is 17:15 − 8:45 = 8:30. Treating the times as decimals (17.15 − 8.45 = 8.70) gives a wrong answer.

Worked example: a six-day week at $18.50 an hour

A warehouse worker’s week, with overtime after 40 hours:

1. Each day: Wednesday runs 7:00 AM to 5:45 PM, which is 10:45; minus the 0:45 break it is 10:00.
2. The week: 8:00 + 8:00 + 10:00 + 8:15 + 8:30 + 4:30 = 47:15, or 47 + 15 ÷ 60 = 47.25 hours.
3. Overtime: 47:15 − 40:00 = 7:15 (7.25 hours). By the end of Thursday the week stands at 34:15, so the first 5:45 of Friday is regular and its last 2:45 is overtime, along with all 4:30 of Saturday.
4. Pay: 40 hours × $18.50 = $740.00 regular, plus 7.25 hours × $18.50 × 1.5 = $201.19 overtime (201.1875 rounded to the cent), for $941.19 gross.

Deducting lunch and other unpaid breaks

Enter only breaks you aren’t paid for. Federal law doesn’t require lunch or coffee breaks, but when an employer gives short breaks of about 5 to 20 minutes, they count as paid work time. A meal period of usually 30 minutes or more, with no duties at all, generally isn’t paid. Many states have their own meal and rest break rules; the Department of Labor keeps a table of them.

A break can’t be as long as the shift it belongs to: the calculator says so on that day instead of showing zero or negative hours.

Split shifts fit on one row: enter the first start, the last end and the gap between the two parts as the break. Working 6:00 AM to 10:00 AM and again from 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM is 6:00 AM to 8:00 PM with a 6:00 break, which is 8:00 of work.

Shifts that go past midnight

A shift whose end time is at or before its start time ends the next day. From 10:00 PM to 6:30 AM is 2:00 before midnight and 6:30 after, 8:30 in all; with a 30-minute break that is 8:00. The box under the end time says “Next day” so you can see it was read that way, and the whole shift counts on the day it started. Five such nights come to exactly 40:00, which is not over a 40-hour threshold, so there is no overtime.

A shift of 16 hours or more gets a warning, because it is usually a missing pm: 9 to 5 reads as 9:00 AM to 5:00 AM the next day, 20 hours. Type 5pm or 17:00 for an afternoon finish.

Clock changes are not counted. On the November night US clocks go back, a 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM shift is 9 hours of work, and on the March night they go forward it is 7. Add or take off that hour yourself on those two nights.

When does overtime start?

Under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, overtime starts after 40 hours in a workweek, at no less than one and a half times the regular rate of pay. A workweek is a fixed period of 168 hours that can start on any day and at any hour. Weekends and holidays are not overtime as such. Some states add daily rules; California’s, for example, pay one and a half times the rate after 8 hours in a workday and double after 12, with extra rules for a seventh straight day of work. Enter the thresholds that apply to your job, since the calculator doesn’t choose a state for you.

When you set both daily and weekly thresholds, this is the order used, so no hour is counted twice:

1. Day by day, hours past the double-time threshold are double time, and hours past the daily overtime threshold are overtime.
2. The hours still counted as regular are then added up in the order worked. Once they pass the weekly threshold, the rest are overtime. Hours already paid as daily overtime don’t count toward the weekly threshold again; federal rules let daily overtime premiums count toward the weekly overtime that is due.

Four 10-hour days, 6:00 AM to 4:30 PM with a 30-minute break, come to 40:00. With only a 40-hour weekly rule there is no overtime and the pay at $18.50 is $740.00. With daily overtime after 8 hours, each day has 2:00 of overtime, 8:00 in all, and the pay is $592.00 + $222.00 = $814.00.

In the worked example, adding daily overtime after 8 hours gives 2:45 of daily overtime (Wednesday 2:00, Thursday 0:15, Friday 0:30) and 4:30 of weekly overtime: 7:15 in all, the same as before, because the 2:45 paid as daily overtime doesn’t also count toward the 40.

With double time after 12 hours as well, a 13-hour day splits into 8:00 regular, 4:00 overtime and 1:00 double time.

Two-week pay periods: overtime is counted per workweek

Overtime is worked out for each workweek on its own, even when you are paid every two weeks. Averaging hours over two or more weeks is not allowed under federal law. Take a week of 44 hours followed by a week of 36:

Adding the weeks first (80 hours against 80) would show no overtime. At $18.50 an hour, the correct pay is 76 × $18.50 = $1,406.00 plus 4 × $27.75 = $111.00, which is $1,517.00, where 80 straight hours would pay $1,480.00. When a two-week timesheet is affected like this, the result says so under the totals.

Converting minutes to decimal hours

Divide the minutes by 60. Rounded to two decimal places:

Decimal hours are not clock notation: 8.30 hours is 8 hours 18 minutes, not 8:30. Add up the minutes before you convert. Three days of 8:20 are 25:00, exactly 25.00 hours, but adding the rounded 8.33 three times gives 24.99.

Rounding clock times

Some time clocks round the times people clock in and out. Federal rules accept rounding to the nearest 5 minutes, tenth of an hour (6 minutes) or quarter hour, as long as it averages out so that, over time, employees are paid for all the time they actually work. With 15-minute rounding here, up to 7 minutes past a quarter rounds down and 8 or more rounds up: 7:07 AM becomes 7:00 AM and 7:08 AM becomes 7:15 AM. Clocking in at 6:53 AM and out at 3:38 PM is 8:45 either way, because both times round up by 7 minutes. The table shows the rounded times with the typed ones in parentheses.

Reading the result

• Total hours worked is the headline, in hours and minutes, with decimal hours and the number of days worked below it.
• Regular hours and Overtime hours split that total; Double-time hours appears when you set a double-time threshold. Gross pay shows each pay line when you enter a rate; without a rate you see your unpaid breaks instead.
• Hours by day lists every day, including days off, with the times as they were read, the break, the hours in both formats and each day’s regular and overtime hours. Weekly overtime falls on the last hours of the week. A two-week timesheet adds a total for each week.
• How this was calculated walks through each day, the week totals, the overtime rules and the pay, and ends with the same calculation as a spreadsheet formula.

Assumptions and limitations

• The hourly rate is treated as the regular rate. Under federal law the regular rate includes all pay for the work except payments the law excludes, such as expense reimbursements, discretionary bonuses and gifts. Other pay, like a production bonus or a higher rate for night shifts, can raise the overtime rate above the one used here.
• Only the overtime rules you enter are applied. Seventh-day rules, holiday premiums, union contracts and state rules the fields don’t cover are left out.
• Each row is one workday, a shift is counted on the day it starts, and a shift can’t be longer than 24 hours.
• Daylight saving clock changes are not modeled.
• Gross pay is before taxes and deductions. It is an educational estimate, not legal or payroll advice.

Common mistakes

• Leaving out am or pm. 9 to 5 is read as a 20-hour shift ending at 5:00 AM. Type 5pm or 17:00.
• Reading decimal hours as minutes. 7.5 hours is 7 hours 30 minutes, not 7:50.
• Subtracting times like decimals. 5:15 PM − 8:45 AM is 8:30, not 8.70.
• Averaging two weeks. 44 and 36 hours still include 4 hours of overtime.
• Deducting paid rest breaks. Short breaks of about 5 to 20 minutes are usually paid; subtract only unpaid meal periods.
• Counting daily overtime twice. Hours paid as daily overtime don’t also count toward the weekly 40.