Hours Calculator

1. How the week is totalled

Each row is one day. The calculator takes the clock-out reading minus the clock-in reading, subtracts the unpaid break in minutes, and keeps the answer in whole seconds. Only then are the seven rows added together. Nothing is rounded on the way through.

That ordering is the whole point. If each day is rounded to the nearest quarter hour first, seven small roundings can shift a week by half an hour, and the printed timesheet stops agreeing with its own total. Rows with no times, or with a break longer than the shift, count as zero rather than as negative time, so a blank Saturday cannot quietly subtract from your week.

The headline is the week in hours and minutes. Beside it you get decimal hours for payroll, days worked (rows with any paid time on them), and the split between regular and overtime hours. Enter an hourly rate and the base, overtime and gross pay figures fill in as well.

Five of those rows are the same eight-hour day arranged differently, which is the point: the span you clock is not the time you are paid for, and the difference is the break. The last row crosses midnight and is still counted forwards, not backwards.

If you only need one of those rows — the hours between two clock readings, or a time with a duration added to it — the time calculator does that on its own and shows the span in decimal hours, total minutes and total seconds.

2. Night shifts and the next-day rule

When the clock-out reading is earlier than the clock-in reading, the shift is taken to end on the following day. A row reading 22:00 to 06:00 is eight hours, not minus sixteen. Nothing needs ticking; the rule is applied per row.

Put the whole shift on the day it started. Splitting a night shift across two rows — 22:00–23:59 on Tuesday and 00:00–06:00 on Wednesday — gives the same weekly total but a different daily one, which matters if your overtime is calculated per day rather than per week. Payroll conventions differ on this; most systems attribute the shift to its start date. Which calendar date that actually is, across a month boundary or a leap day, is what the date calculator settles.

3. Unpaid breaks

The break column is unpaid minutes, taken off that day's gross span. Leave it empty or at zero for a paid break, or for a day with no break at all.

Which breaks are unpaid is a matter of law and contract rather than arithmetic, and the rules vary by country and by state. Under the US Fair Labor Standards Act, short rest breaks of roughly five to twenty minutes are generally treated as paid working time, while a bona fide meal period — usually thirty minutes or more, with the employee genuinely relieved of duty — need not be paid. Many jurisdictions add their own minimum-break requirements on top of that.

Enter what your own arrangement says. If a thirty-minute lunch is unpaid, put 30 in the break column; if you are on call through it and it counts as work, leave it out.

4. Overtime: weekly and daily thresholds

The Overtime after field is a threshold in hours and the basis dropdown says how it is applied.

• Per week — everything above the threshold across the whole week is overtime. Set 40 and you have the US federal rule: under the FLSA, non-exempt employees are owed at least one-and-a-half times their regular rate for hours worked beyond 40 in a workweek. There is no federal daily overtime requirement.
• Per day — the threshold applies to each day separately, and the daily overages are added up. Set 8 and you have the shape of the California rule, where hours past eight in a day attract time-and-a-half.

The multiplier is yours to set; 1.5 is the common default, and 2.0 covers double-time arrangements. The calculator applies a single multiplier to all overtime, so tiered rules — California's double time past twelve hours in a day, or premium rates for a seventh consecutive day — need two passes, one per tier, rather than a single total.

The basis is not a formatting choice. Here is one 40-hour week under each rule:

Forty hours either way, and no overtime at all on the weekly threshold — but six hours of it on the daily one. At a rate of 20 an hour with a 1.5 multiplier that is 800 gross against 860 for the identical week. Which figure is correct depends entirely on which rule you are under, so set the basis before you read the pay.

Set the threshold to zero to switch overtime off entirely and treat every hour as regular.

5. Rounding rules and what the pay figure includes

Employers commonly round clock times — to the nearest five minutes, tenth of an hour or quarter hour. US Department of Labor guidance has long accepted quarter-hour rounding provided it is neutral over time and does not systematically favour the employer; the widely used “seven-minute rule” is the quarter-hour version, where seven minutes or fewer rounds down and eight or more rounds up.

This calculator deliberately does not round. It gives you the exact figure so you can compare it with what you were paid, and if you need a rounded number you can round the single weekly total rather than seven daily ones. The difference between those two approaches is usually where a disputed timesheet comes from.

The pay figures are gross. Nothing is deducted for income tax, national insurance, social security, pension contributions or benefits, and no shift premium, bonus or tip credit is applied. Under the FLSA the overtime multiplier applies to the regular rate, which can be higher than the base hourly rate once certain bonuses are included — another reason to treat this as a check on hours rather than a payslip.

Nothing you enter is transmitted. There is no account, no cloud sync and no saved timesheet: the seven rows live in the page until you close the tab. If you need to keep a record, use the copy button and paste it somewhere you control.