Hours calculator
Enter when you started and finished, take off the unpaid break, and you get the hours both ways: as a decimal for payroll, and as hours and minutes for everything else. Add a rate and it works out the pay.
How to calculate hours worked
The decimal figure is the one payroll wants, and it is where the money leaks. Seven hours and 45 minutes is 7.75 hours, not 7.45, and anybody converting by shifting the decimal point gives away eighteen minutes a shift. Over a five-day week that is an hour and a half; over a year it is closer to two working weeks. The h:mm reading beside it exists for the timesheet and the conversation, since 7:45 is what a human recognises and 7.75 is what a rate multiplies.
Two other things decide whether the number here matches the number on the payslip. The first is the overnight shift: 22:00 to 06:00 is eight hours, and a calculator that subtracts naively reports minus sixteen. This one wraps past midnight and takes the break off afterwards, so a night shift with thirty unpaid minutes comes out at 7.5. The second is whether the break is unpaid at all. In the US, federal rules generally treat short breaks of about five to twenty minutes as paid working time, while a bona fide meal break of thirty minutes or more usually is not; state law and your own contract can say something different again, and the field here does whatever you tell it.
What people use it for
- Filling in a timesheet from clock-in and clock-out times
- Checking a payslip against the hours a shift actually ran
- Totalling a night shift that finishes the following morning
- Turning a session into a figure to invoice at an hourly rate
- Settling whether the unpaid break came off once or twice
Questions
Eight, exactly. Eight and a half gross, less thirty unpaid minutes, which the panel shows as 8.00 and as 8:00.
A finish earlier than the start is read as the next day, and the break comes off after that wrap. So 22:00 to 06:00 with thirty unpaid minutes is 7.5 paid hours, never minus sixteen and a half.
Only if it genuinely is unpaid. US federal rules generally count short breaks of five to twenty minutes as paid time and a proper meal break of thirty minutes or more as unpaid; your contract or your state may set something else.
Paid hours times the rate you typed, and nothing beyond that. No overtime multiplier, no tax, no deductions. It is the gross line a payslip starts from, useful for checking that line and not for predicting what lands in the bank.
Usually rounding. Some employers round each clock-in to the nearest quarter hour, which under US federal rules is only acceptable if it averages out over time instead of always falling the employer’s way. Put the raw times in here and compare.
Not on this page, which takes one shift at a time. The time duration calculator has a week-of-shifts mode: a line per day, with the overtime split out.
No. It is calculated in the page and nothing is sent anywhere.