Work Hours Calculator

Work Hours Calculator

A full weekly time card calculator, not just a single shift. Enter your start and finish times and breaks for each day and get daily and weekly hours in clock format and decimal hours, an overtime breakdown under rules you control, gross pay if you add your rate, and a timesheet you can download or print. Overnight shifts, paid and unpaid breaks, optional rounding, daily overtime and double time, and two-week pay periods are all covered. Prefer to work backwards? The clock-out mode tells you when to leave to hit your target hours.

Week 1

Disclaimer: This calculator gives estimates for general information only. It is not financial, legal or other professional advice. Gross pay here is before tax and deductions; overtime rules vary by employer, state and country, so check your own terms for the rules that apply to you.

What this calculator does

Most work hours tools stop at one shift. This one runs the whole pay period. It is a time card calculator and timesheet calculator in one: a row for every day, clock in and clock out times, breaks split into paid and unpaid, and totals that come out both as clock time (8:30) and as decimal hours (8.50), because payroll systems run on decimals and people run on clocks. On top of the hours it layers overtime under rules you set yourself: a weekly threshold, a daily threshold, double time, each with its own multiplier, plus optional rounding that is always declared in the results and never applied silently. Add an hourly rate and it estimates gross pay, regular, overtime and double time kept separate. The finished timesheet downloads as a text file or prints cleanly for your records.

How to use it

  1. One row per day, times as you clocked them. Times can be typed in 24-hour format. Leave a day fully blank on rest days. If the finish time is earlier than the start, the calculator treats the shift as overnight and counts the hours into the day the shift began, which is how most payroll systems record night work.
  2. Breaks come in two kinds and the difference is money. Unpaid break minutes are subtracted from the shift (the classic lunch). Paid break minutes are recorded for the timesheet but stay inside your paid hours, which is how short rest breaks are usually treated. Splitting them this way is what tools that offer a single break box cannot do.
  3. Set overtime rules to match your own terms. The defaults are the common US pattern: overtime after 40 hours in a week at time and a half. If your employer pays daily overtime after 8 hours, or double time after 12, enter those thresholds too. Hours are never counted twice: daily overtime and double time are taken out first, and the weekly threshold then applies to what remains, which is the standard payroll order.
  4. Rounding is a choice, and it shows its face. Some employers round each day to the nearest 5, 6 or 15 minutes. Choose the same rule here and the results line tells you it was applied. Turn it off and you get exact minutes. Nothing is rounded behind your back.
  5. Gross pay is an estimate with a label on it. It is hours times rate, before tax, pension, or any other deduction. For take-home pay you need a paycheck calculator, not this page, and the two are kept separate on purpose.
  6. Clock-out mode works the day backwards. Start time, the hours you must work, and your break, and it returns the time you can leave, in 12-hour and 24-hour format, flagging it when the answer lands after midnight.

How it is calculated

For each day: shift minutes = end time minus start time (plus 24 hours when the shift runs overnight). Worked minutes = shift minutes minus unpaid break minutes. Paid break minutes stay in. Rounding, if selected, rounds each day’s worked minutes to the nearest chosen step. Double time minutes = worked minutes beyond the double-time threshold. Daily overtime minutes = worked minutes beyond the daily overtime threshold, excluding double time minutes. Regular minutes = the remainder. Across each week, regular minutes beyond the weekly overtime threshold are reclassified as overtime. Pay: regular hours times rate, overtime hours times rate times the overtime multiplier, double time hours times rate times the double time multiplier, each line rounded to cents before the gross is summed. Decimal hours = minutes divided by 60.

Worked examples

The standard week: Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM with a 30 minute unpaid lunch is 8 hours a day, 40:00 for the week (40.00 decimal), all regular. At $20 an hour that is $800.00 gross, about $3,466.67 a month on the weekly times 52 divided by 12 estimate the results show.

Adding Saturday: the same shift on Saturday takes the week to 48:00. The first 40 hours stay regular; 8 hours become overtime at time and a half, $240.00 on top of the $800.00, for $1,040.00 gross. This is the single most common timesheet question there is, and it is worth noticing that the overtime premium is only the extra half: the base hour was already inside the regular rate.

A long day with daily rules: 6:00 AM to 7:30 PM with 30 minutes unpaid is a 13 hour day. With daily overtime after 8 and double time after 12, it splits into 8 regular, 4 overtime and 1 double time hour. Without the daily rules the same day would be 13 regular hours against the weekly threshold, which is why the rule settings matter and why they are yours to set.

A night shift: 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM with a 30 minute unpaid break is 7:30 worked (7.50). The calculator counts it into the day it started and notes the overnight span in the results, instead of producing the negative number a naive subtraction would give.

Reading your result

If your total looks a few minutes different from your employer’s system, rounding is the first suspect: compare with rounding set to their rule, then to none. If a whole hour is missing, check the break: an unpaid lunch entered on a day you worked through lunch is the classic cause, and it is also the classic real-world dispute, which is why this page keeps paid and unpaid breaks in separate boxes. If overtime seems low in a week with long days, check whether daily overtime is on: those hours come out of the weekly pool first, by design, so the weekly line can look smaller while the total overtime is the same or larger.

Limitations

  • It does not know your employer’s or your state’s rules. Overtime law and company policy vary (daily overtime states, seventh-day rules, union agreements). The thresholds here are settings, not legal statements; match them to your own terms.
  • Gross pay excludes everything withheld. Tax, retirement contributions, insurance and garnishments all come off after this page’s job ends. A paycheck calculator handles that side.
  • One worker, one rate. The sheet models a single person’s period at a single base rate. Shift differentials, multiple jobs at different rates, and salaried conversions belong elsewhere (the salary calculator covers the last of these).
  • Times are entered, not punched. This is a calculator, not a time clock: it cannot stop a mistyped 17:30 that should have been 07:30, though the overnight flag catches many of those mistakes by making them visible.

Frequently asked questions

How do I convert minutes to decimal hours for payroll?

Divide the minutes by 60. Fifteen minutes is 0.25, thirty is 0.50, forty-five is 0.75. Payroll multiplies decimal hours by your rate, which is why timesheets are kept in decimals even though nobody thinks in them. Every day on this page shows both formats side by side so you can check your employer’s decimal against your own clock time.

Should my lunch break be deducted?

That depends on your employer’s policy and your local rules, not on arithmetic. Unpaid meal breaks are commonly deducted when you are fully relieved of duty; short rest breaks are commonly paid. This calculator does not decide for you: it gives you an unpaid box and a paid box, and your job is to put each break in the box your own terms say it belongs in. If the two disagree with your pay stub, the stub’s treatment is the one to match while you query it.

How does biweekly overtime work?

In the common US pattern, overtime is judged week by week even inside a two-week pay period: 45 hours in week one and 35 in week two is 5 overtime hours, not zero, because the weeks do not average. Set the pay period to 2 weeks here and the calculator applies the weekly threshold inside each week separately, exactly that way, and shows both week totals so you can see it happening.

What is the difference between this and a paycheck calculator?

This page answers “how many hours, of what kind, and what gross do they make”. A paycheck calculator answers “what lands in the bank” after tax and deductions. Hours first, then deductions: use this page to verify the hours on your stub and the paycheck page to verify the money.

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Method: per-day worked minutes as elapsed time minus unpaid breaks, overnight shifts rolled into their start day, daily overtime and double time carved out before the weekly threshold is applied, pay lines rounded to cents individually, rounding of days optional and always declared in the results. Last reviewed: 13 October 2026.