Hours Calculator

You clocked in at 9:00 AM, clocked out at 5:30 PM, and took a 30-minute unpaid lunch. How many hours did you actually work? The answer is 8 hours — but doing that subtraction across five days, with breaks and the occasional late night, is exactly where timesheets go wrong. This hours calculator takes your start time, end time, and break for each day and returns the hours worked in two formats — decimal hours (8.00) for payroll and hours-and-minutes (8h 00m) for a quick clock-style check — then adds up your week and, if you enter an hourly rate, estimates your gross pay.

How hours worked are calculated

The core formula is simple subtraction, in this order:

The calculator converts each time to minutes since midnight, subtracts to get the shift length, removes the unpaid break, and divides by 60 for decimal hours. When the end time is earlier than the start time, it adds 24 hours so an overnight shift comes out positive instead of negative.

Converting between decimal hours and minutes

Payroll runs on decimal hours because you can multiply them straight by a pay rate. To convert minutes to a decimal, divide by 60. The most common values are worth memorizing:

So 7 hours and 45 minutes is 7.75 decimal hours, and 6 hours 20 minutes is 6.33 hours. Going the other way, multiply the fractional part by 60: 0.25 decimal hours is 0.25 × 60 = 15 minutes.

How to use this hours calculator

You only need three numbers per day. Work down the rows:

1. Start time: enter when your shift began in 24-hour HH:MM (for example 09:00, or 14:30 for 2:30 PM).
2. End time: enter when you clocked out. If it is the next morning, just type the morning time — the calculator detects the overnight roll-over.
3. Break (min): enter your unpaid break in minutes. Leave it at 0 if your breaks are paid.
4. Add another day: use the button to add a row for each day of the week. The weekly total updates as you go.
5. Hourly rate: tick "Calculate gross pay" and enter your rate to estimate earnings. Any hours over 40 are split out at 1.5×.

The big number at the top is your total in decimal hours, with the hh:mm equivalent underneath. The daily breakdown table shows each day's hours and pay so you can reconcile against a paper timesheet.

Who this calculator is for

• Hourly employees checking that a paycheck matches the hours they actually worked.
• Freelancers and contractors totaling billable time across a week before invoicing a client.
• Small-business owners and managers tallying staff timesheets without a payroll system — the Timesheet Calculator adds a fuller multi-day layout.
• Shift and overnight workers who need a tool that handles times that cross midnight.
• Students and part-timers estimating gross pay before taxes for budgeting.

Worked example 1: a standard day

You start at 08:00, finish at 16:30, and take a 30-minute unpaid lunch. The raw shift is 8 hours 30 minutes (510 minutes); subtract the 30-minute break and you worked 8 hours 0 minutes, or 8.00 decimal hours. At $20/hour that is $160 gross for the day.

Worked example 2: an overnight shift

A night-shift worker clocks in at 22:00 and out at 06:30 with a 45-minute unpaid meal break. Because the end time is earlier than the start, the calculator rolls over midnight: 22:00 to 06:30 spans 8 hours 30 minutes (510 minutes). Subtract the 45-minute break and the net is 7 hours 45 minutes, or 7.75 decimal hours. Without the overnight handling, naive subtraction would have produced a meaningless negative result.

Worked example 3: a full week with overtime

Suppose you work 9:00–17:30 with a 30-minute lunch (8.00 h) Monday through Friday, plus a 9:00–14:00 Saturday shift with no break (5.00 h). That is 45.00 hours for the week. At $22/hour, the first 40 hours are regular pay (40 × $22 = $880) and the 5 overtime hours are paid at time-and-a-half (5 × $22 × 1.5 = $165), for $1,045 gross. The calculator separates the regular and overtime pay so you can see exactly where the extra comes from.

Paid vs. unpaid breaks

Whether a break counts as work time changes your total. Under U.S. Department of Labor rules, short rest breaks (commonly 5 to 20 minutes) are generally paid and counted as hours worked, while a bona fide meal period (usually 30 minutes or more, during which you are completely relieved of duty) is unpaid and excluded. Only enter unpaid time in the break field — if you keep working through lunch, that time is compensable and should not be deducted.

Overtime: the 40-hour rule

The federal Fair Labor Standards Act requires that nonexempt employees be paid at least 1.5 times their regular rate for hours over 40 in a workweek. There is no federal daily overtime rule, but several states impose one (for example overtime after 8 hours in a day, and double-time after 12). This calculator applies the federal weekly threshold; if your state has stricter rules, your real pay may be higher. For a deeper breakdown of premium pay — including daily rules and double-time — the dedicated Overtime Calculator is the better fit.

Time rounding and the seven-minute rule

Many employers round clock punches, often to the nearest quarter hour. The common "seven-minute rule" rounds down for the first 7 minutes past a quarter-hour mark and up from minute 8. Rounding is legal only if it is neutral over time and does not systematically reduce pay. This calculator works to the exact minute, so if your employer rounds, your paystub can differ slightly from the figure here.

Key time and payroll terms

• Decimal hours: hours expressed as a decimal (7.50) rather than hours and minutes (7h 30m); used to multiply by a pay rate.
• Gross pay: earnings before any taxes or deductions — hours × rate (plus overtime).
• Net pay: take-home pay after withholdings; always lower than gross.
• Workweek: a fixed, recurring 168-hour period (seven consecutive 24-hour days) used to figure weekly overtime.
• Nonexempt employee: a worker entitled to minimum wage and overtime under the FLSA.
• Shift differential: extra pay for less desirable hours (nights, weekends); not included in this calculator.

Common questions about the math

People often ask why a "9 to 5" is not always 8 hours of pay — the answer is the unpaid lunch, which turns it into 7.5. Others wonder why their decimal total has trailing digits like 38.33; that comes from minutes that do not divide evenly into 60 (20 minutes is one-third of an hour). And the most frequent surprise is that gross pay looks high relative to the deposit in the bank: that gap is taxes and withholdings, which this tool does not subtract. To estimate take-home pay after federal and state withholding, move the gross figure into the Paycheck Calculator.

Reading a time card and 12-hour vs 24-hour time

The single most common entry mistake is mixing 12-hour clock readings with 24-hour input. A paper time card might say "1:30 – 5:00," but if you type 1:30 and 5:00 the calculator reads a 3.5-hour gap when you actually meant 1:30 PM to 5:00 PM. Convert PM times by adding 12 to the hour: 1 PM is 13:00, 5 PM is 17:00, and 11:30 PM is 23:30. Noon is 12:00 and midnight is 00:00. The one exception people trip on is 12 AM through 12:59 AM, which becomes 00:00 through 00:59 in 24-hour time, and 12 PM through 12:59 PM, which stays 12:00 through 12:59. When in doubt, picture the shift on a clock face: a finish before the start almost always means a PM time was typed as AM, not a genuine overnight shift.

If your time card already shows punches in and out for the day, enter the first punch as the start and the last punch as the end, and put the combined unpaid break minutes (lunch plus any unpaid rest periods) into the break field. For days with split shifts — say a morning block and an evening block with a long unpaid gap between them — treat each block as its own row so the gap is never counted as worked time.

Tracking billable hours as a freelancer or contractor

For hourly freelancers, the hours total is the invoice. A few habits keep it accurate. Record start and stop times the moment you switch tasks rather than reconstructing the day from memory, which almost always inflates or deflates the total. Decide upfront whether short interruptions count as billable — a five-minute email is usually fine to include, but a two-hour personal errand is not — and apply that rule consistently. When you bill, copy the decimal weekly total into your invoice, because most invoicing software multiplies decimal hours by your rate; entering "38h 45m" literally would be read as a strange number. If you bill several clients, total each client's hours in its own session so a single weekly figure does not blur the split. Once you know your typical weekly hours, the Hourly to Salary Calculator turns your rate into an annualized figure you can compare against salaried roles.

Why payroll prefers decimal hours

It is tempting to keep time in the hours-and-minutes form you read off a clock, but payroll and accounting systems run on decimal hours for one reason: arithmetic. You cannot directly multiply "7h 45m" by a $20 rate, because minutes are base-60 and dollars are base-10 — you would have to convert first anyway. Decimal hours (7.75) skip that step, so total pay is simply hours × rate, and weekly totals add up cleanly without carrying minutes over into the next hour. The trade-off is that decimals can hide a rounding gap: a recurring 20-minute value shows as 0.33, and across many days those clipped thirds can drift a minute or two from a to-the-minute tally. This calculator keeps the underlying math in whole minutes and only rounds the displayed decimal, so the weekly total stays faithful to the actual minutes worked even though each row shows a tidy two-decimal figure.

How it compares to related calculators

This page answers "how many hours did I work, and what is that worth?" If your question is slightly different, a sister tool fits better:

• To log a fuller week with more days and a printable layout, use the Timesheet Calculator.
• To break out premium pay, daily overtime, and double-time, use the Overtime Calculator.
• To turn gross hours into take-home pay after taxes, use the Paycheck Calculator or the Salary Calculator.
• To convert an hourly wage into an annual salary (or back), use the Hourly to Salary Calculator.
• To add or subtract raw durations (hours, minutes, seconds) without a clock, use the Time Calculator; to count days between two dates, use the Date Calculator.