Time Card Calculator

Reading a paper timesheet into decimal hours

Payroll runs on decimal hours, but a timesheet is written in clock time, and the conversion between the two is where most manual timesheet errors happen. The rule is simple once it is stated plainly: minutes are a fraction of 60, not a fraction of 100. Fifteen minutes is a quarter of an hour, so it becomes .25. Thirty minutes is half an hour, so it becomes .5. Forty-five minutes is three-quarters of an hour, so it becomes .75.

A shift from 9:00 to 5:45 is 8 hours and 45 minutes — written as 8.75 hours, not 8.45. Treating the 45 as if it were already a decimal is the single most common mistake on a hand-totalled timesheet, and it understates the true figure by three tenths of an hour every time it happens. Over a two-week pay period across a handful of employees, that quietly adds up to real underpaid wages.

The 15-minute rounding rule

Many employers round clock times to the nearest 5, 10 or 15 minutes rather than paying to the exact minute, and the Department of Labor permits this. The condition is that the rounding has to be neutral over time: it must round up roughly as often as it rounds down, so that on average an employee is neither shorted nor overpaid. A policy that rounds a late clock-in down to the next quarter-hour but never rounds a late clock-out up the same way fails that test, because it systematically favours the employer. That kind of one-directional rounding is one of the more common wage-and-hour complaints filed with state labour departments.

A separate, narrower rule sometimes called the "seven-minute rule" follows from the same 15-minute standard: 1 to 7 minutes past the quarter-hour rounds down, and 8 to 14 minutes rounds up. It only applies where an employer has actually adopted rounding — an employee working to the exact minute with a time-clock system is simply owed exact-minute pay.

Meal breaks, rest breaks, and what counts as worktime

Federal law draws a sharp line between two kinds of break, and timesheets often blur it. A bona fide meal break — typically 30 minutes or longer, during which an employee is completely relieved of duties and free to leave the work area — is not paid worktime under the FLSA and should be entered as a break so it is subtracted from the total. If an employee is asked to keep working through lunch, eat at their desk while monitoring a phone, or is otherwise not truly free, that time is worktime regardless of what the schedule calls it.

A short rest break, usually somewhere from 5 to 20 minutes, is treated the opposite way: it is paid worktime and should not be deducted, because it primarily benefits the employer by keeping the employee productive and on-site. Several states go further than federal law and legally require a paid rest break and an unpaid meal break on set schedules, so the specific timing rules can vary by state even though the federal baseline is consistent.

Overnight shifts cross the clock, not the calendar

A shift that starts at 10:00 pm and ends at 6:00 am the next morning is 8 hours, full stop — but a timesheet that simply subtracts the start time from the end time will compute a negative number, because 6:00 is earlier than 22:00 on a 24-hour clock. The fix is to recognise that an end time earlier than the start time means the shift wrapped past midnight, and to add a full day to the calculation rather than reporting an impossible negative shift. This calculator handles that automatically; a spreadsheet built without the wraparound logic will not, and it is the most frequent way a manual timesheet miscounts a night-shift worker's hours.

What employers are required to keep on record

For a non-exempt employee, the FLSA requires an employer to keep records of the hours worked each workday and each workweek, the regular hourly rate, total daily or weekly straight-time earnings, and total overtime pay for the week. Payroll records generally have to be kept for at least three years, and the records used to calculate pay — time cards, work schedules, piece-rate tickets — for at least two. Nothing in federal law stops an employee from keeping a personal copy of hours worked as well, and doing so is genuinely useful: if an employer's own records are ever incomplete or disputed, a worker's contemporaneous notes carry real weight.

What this calculator does not include

• State daily overtime rules, such as California's premium past 8 hours in a single day regardless of the weekly total
• Double time thresholds
• Shift differentials, tips, or non-discretionary bonuses folded into the regular rate
• Paid holidays, sick pay, or PTO hours that were not actually worked
• State-specific paid rest break or meal break penalty pay for a missed break
• Multi-week pay periods — overtime here is calculated one workweek at a time, as federal law requires