Time Card Calculator

Filling it in

Type a start time and an end time on each day you worked. The fields are deliberately forgiving, because entering fourteen punch times is tedious and a form that insists on one exact format makes it worse. All of these are read correctly: 9, 09, 930, 0930, 9:30, 9.30 and 5:30p. Type it the way you would say it, press tab, and the field tidies itself when you leave it. Underneath each row the tool echoes back the two times it actually used, so if it misunderstood something you can see that immediately rather than at the bottom of the week.

The break column takes minutes. A bare 30 there means thirty minutes, which is the opposite of how a bare 9 is read in the start column, and that is intentional: a break of nine hours is not a thing anyone means, and a start time of thirty minutes past midnight is not what anyone types into a break field. If you would rather be explicit, 0:30 and 30m both work too.

Days you did not work stay empty. An empty row is not an error and contributes nothing. A row with only one of the two times is flagged, because that is almost always a half finished entry rather than a deliberate one.

Hours and minutes, or hours and hundredths

Payroll runs on decimal hours. Your own head runs on hours and minutes. Confusing the two is the most common mistake on a timesheet, and it is worth being blunt about the size of it: eight hours and fifteen minutes is 8.25 decimal hours, not 8.15. Writing 8.15 shaves six minutes off the day. Do that on ten shifts and an hour has gone missing.

The conversion is minutes divided by sixty. Fifteen minutes is 0.25, twenty minutes is 0.33, half an hour is 0.5, forty minutes is 0.67, forty five minutes is 0.75. The awkward ones are the thirds, because they do not land on a tidy decimal at all, which is exactly why some employers round to six minute increments: a tenth of an hour is six minutes, so every punch lands on a clean decimal.

This tool shows both figures for every total, in both the daily rows and the weekly summary, so there is never a moment where you have to do that division yourself and never a moment where the wrong one gets copied onto a form.

Rounding, and the seven minute rule

Plenty of employers round punch times, and there is a legal frame for it in the United States. Rule 29 CFR 785.48 allows time to be recorded to the nearest five minutes, tenth of an hour or quarter hour, on the condition that the rounding is neutral over time: it has to average out, rather than always landing in the employer's favour. A policy that rounds every start time forward and every end time back is not neutral, and courts have said so.

Quarter hour rounding is where the seven minute rule comes from. With fifteen minute increments, the midpoint is seven and a half minutes, so clocking in at seven minutes past rounds back to the hour and clocking in at eight minutes past rounds forward to the quarter. Nothing is being taken from you at seven minutes past; the same rule gives it back at the end of the shift.

The rounding setting here applies to each punch, which is the only way that produces the same answer your employer's system will. Rounding the weekly total instead is a different calculation with a different result, and it is what most quick calculators get wrong. If your employer does not round, leave it on no rounding, which is the default.

Overtime, and the trap of counting it twice

Under the US Fair Labor Standards Act, overtime is owed on hours worked over forty in a workweek, at not less than one and a half times the regular rate. That is the default here. Some states add a daily rule on top: California, Alaska and Nevada among others treat anything over eight hours in a day as overtime, and California goes further with double time past twelve.

When both rules are switched on, the order matters. Four twelve hour days is forty eight hours. Sixteen of those are daily overtime, over eight on each of four days. The remaining thirty two are straight time, and thirty two is under forty, so there is no weekly overtime at all. The answer is sixteen hours of overtime. The wrong answer, twenty four, comes from counting the same sixteen hours once daily and again weekly. This calculator takes daily overtime first and applies the weekly threshold only to what is left, which is the rule in the states that have both.

Outside the United States the picture is different enough that the thresholds are yours to set. The UK has no statutory overtime premium at all; what it has is a 48 hour average working week limit that can be opted out of, and whatever your contract says about extra hours. Australia handles overtime through awards and enterprise agreements, so the trigger and the multiplier both depend on which award covers you. Set the two threshold fields to match your own arrangement rather than assuming the defaults apply.

Night shifts, breaks and the things that go wrong

A shift that runs past midnight is the classic broken timesheet. Subtracting 06:00 from 22:00 gives minus sixteen hours, and a calculator that does not notice will either show a negative number or quietly show nothing. Here an end time at or before the start is read as the following day, so the answer is eight hours, and the row says overnight so you can see the assumption rather than trust it.

Breaks are the other place hours go astray. In the US, short rest breaks of roughly five to twenty minutes are generally counted as paid work time, while a genuine meal break of thirty minutes or more, where you are actually relieved of duty, is not. So a lunch you spent at your desk answering the phone is usually not an unpaid break at all. Only enter time in the break column that your employer does not pay you for.

One more thing worth knowing: a workweek for overtime purposes is a fixed period of seven consecutive days, and it does not have to start on a Monday or line up with your pay period. If your employer's week runs Sunday to Saturday, enter your hours against that week rather than a calendar one, or the overtime figure will be split across two weeks and come out lower than it should.

What happens to what you type

Nothing leaves your device. The whole calculation runs in your browser, and the card is saved in your browser's own storage so it survives closing the tab and coming back tomorrow. There is no account, no upload and no server that could hold a copy. That matters more here than on a timer: a completed time card carries your shift pattern and often your hourly rate, and neither of those is anyone else's business. Clear empties the card, and the privacy policy lists every key the site writes.

Related tools

For a single span rather than a week, the hours calculator works out the time between two times and adds or subtracts lengths of time. If you are timing work as it happens rather than reconstructing it afterwards, the stopwatch records laps and splits, and the timer counts down to the end of a billable block.