Time Card Calculator

How Hours and Overtime Are Calculated

For each day, this calculator subtracts your unpaid break time from the raw span between clock-in and clock-out to get hours worked — the same method used on a standard paper or digital time card. Daily totals are summed by week, and under the most common overtime rule in the United States (the FLSA standard), any hours beyond 40 in a single workweek are paid at an overtime multiplier, typically 1.5× the regular hourly rate ("time and a half"). Overtime is calculated per week, not per pay period, which is why a biweekly card here tracks week 1 and week 2 separately rather than pooling all 80 hours together. If a clock-out time is earlier than the clock-in time, the calculator assumes the shift crossed midnight and adds 24 hours automatically.

A Common Timesheet Mistake

Many hourly employees miscount hours by forgetting that unpaid meal breaks must be subtracted, or by rounding clock times inconsistently from day to day. A shift from 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. with a 30-minute unpaid lunch is 8 hours worked, not 8.5 — the break comes out of the paid total, and only unpaid breaks should be entered here (short paid breaks, like a 10-minute coffee break some employers allow, should be left out of the break field entirely). Overtime rules and thresholds also vary by state, industry, and country, so treat the 40-hour/week, 1.5x defaults here as the common U.S. baseline and adjust the threshold and multiplier fields to match your actual employer policy or local labor law.

Just Need One Day?

If you only need to work out the hours for a single shift rather than a full weekly or biweekly card, the hours calculator is a faster one-day tool. For converting a decimal hours figure into hours and minutes, or vice versa, try the time duration calculator.