Timecard Calculator

Enter your shifts, deduct unpaid breaks, and get total hours split into regular and overtime with an estimated gross. The arithmetic is easy to get wrong by hand because time is base 60 and pay is base 10, and the conversion between them is where most timecard disputes start.

How to use it

1. Enter start and end times for each shift.
2. Enter any unpaid break minutes to deduct.
3. Read total hours, the regular and overtime split, and estimated gross pay.

Decimal hours, not hours and minutes

Payroll runs on decimal hours. Seven hours and 45 minutes is 7.75 hours, because 45 minutes is three quarters of an hour. Writing it as 7.45 is a 0.30 hour error per instance, and it is the most common manual timecard mistake there is.

The conversion is minutes divided by 60. The values worth knowing by heart are 15 minutes as 0.25, 20 as 0.33, 30 as 0.50, 40 as 0.67, and 45 as 0.75.

The error compounds quietly. Ten minutes miscounted per day across a two-week pay period is well over an hour, and at $25 an hour that is real money in one direction or the other. Adding the times as clock values and converting once at the end is more reliable than converting each entry, and it is what this tool does.

Overtime is calculated per week, not per pay period

Under the United States Fair Labor Standards Act, overtime is owed at one and a half times the regular rate for hours over 40 in a single workweek. The workweek is a fixed, recurring seven-day period the employer designates.

The practical consequence is that a biweekly pay period cannot be treated as an 80-hour block. Someone working 50 hours one week and 30 the next has worked 80 hours in total and is owed 10 hours of overtime, not zero. Averaging across the two weeks is not permitted, and it is a frequent source of back-pay claims.

Federal law does not require daily overtime, but some states do. California is the most significant: over 8 hours in a day is time and a half, over 12 hours is double time, and the seventh consecutive day in a workweek carries its own premium. Alaska, Nevada, and Colorado have daily rules of their own. Where state law is more generous, it governs.

One further detail that surprises people: the overtime rate is based on the regular rate of pay, which includes non-discretionary bonuses, shift differentials, and commissions — not just the base hourly figure. An employee with a production bonus has a higher regular rate than their stated wage, and overtime computed on the base rate alone underpays.

Rounding and the seven-minute rule

Rounding recorded time to quarter-hour increments is permitted in the United States, subject to a specific condition: it must be neutral over time and must not consistently favour the employer.

The convention this produces is the seven-minute rule. Minutes 1 through 7 past a quarter-hour mark round down, minutes 8 through 14 round up. Applied consistently the rounding cancels out across many entries.

Where employers get into trouble is one-directional rounding — always rounding clock-in up and clock-out down. That is systematic underpayment regardless of how small each instance is, and it has produced substantial class actions. Some jurisdictions, California among them, have moved against time rounding entirely where an electronic system records actual minutes, on the reasoning that there is no administrative justification for approximating a figure the system already has exactly.

This calculator does not round. It computes actual elapsed time, which is the correct starting point whether or not a rounding policy is applied afterwards.

What time is compensable

Breaks and adjacent activities are where hours get lost, and the rules are more favourable to employees than most people assume.

• Short rest breaks, generally 20 minutes or less, are compensable work time under federal law and cannot be deducted. Only bona fide meal periods, normally 30 minutes or more with the employee fully relieved of duty, may be unpaid.
• A meal break interrupted by work is not a bona fide meal period. Answering the phone or covering the counter during lunch makes the whole period compensable in most interpretations.
• Automatic meal deductions are a common compliance failure. Deducting 30 minutes regardless of whether the break was taken results in unpaid work whenever it was not.
• Donning required protective equipment, mandatory security screening, and startup or shutdown activities integral to the job are generally compensable, and this has been litigated repeatedly.
• Work performed off the clock is compensable whether or not it was authorised. An employer that knows or should know work is happening owes for it, which is why checking email after hours is a real exposure.

At a glance

Frequently asked questions

Read more

Working with dates and time — Days are exact, months are a convention, and two hours a year do not exist or happen twice.

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