Work Hours Calculator

How to calculate hours worked in a week

1. Enter each day’s start and end time — the time pickers take hours, minutes and AM/PM. Leave a day empty for a day off.
2. Enter unpaid breaks in minutes for each day, such as a 30-minute lunch.
3. Copy Monday to Tue–Fri if you work the same hours every weekday, then change any day that was different.
4. Read the week: each day’s hours appear in its row as you type; the result shows the week in hours and minutes and in decimal hours, the days worked, the average per day and anything over 40 hours.

Add your hourly rate to see gross pay for the week, with overtime at time-and-a-half. For a dated weekly or biweekly card you can print or download as CSV, use the time card calculator. For one shift with paid and unpaid breaks, use the hours calculator.

Night shifts and days off

A shift that ends after midnight is entered with its real start and end times: 10:00 PM to 6:30 AM is 8 hours 30 minutes on the clock — 8 hours after a 30-minute break. The calculator marks it next day and counts it on the day it started, the usual way time cards record it.

Some online time cards subtract a night shift the wrong way round and count 10 PM to 6:30 AM as 15 hours; check that each day’s figure looks right before you add them up. On the nights the clocks change in March and November, a night shift is an hour shorter or longer than the clock says — the time duration calculator handles those.

Overtime: hours over 40

Federal law sets overtime by the workweek: non-exempt employees earn at least 1.5 times their regular rate for every hour over 40 (29 U.S.C. 207).

Overtime is counted per workweek, not averaged over two weeks: 30 hours one week and 50 the next still means 10 hours of overtime. Salaried exempt employees are not covered by the 40-hour rule, and states such as California also require daily overtime after 8 hours — this calculator applies the federal weekly rule only — for California’s daily rules and double time, use the overtime calculator. The pay shown is gross, before taxes and deductions.

Breaks: what counts as work time

• Rest breaks of about 5 to 20 minutes are counted as hours worked and paid (29 CFR 785.18). Do not enter them as breaks here.
• Meal breaks of usually 30 minutes or more, when you are completely relieved from duty, are not work time (29 CFR 785.19). Enter these.
• Rounding: many time clocks round punches to the nearest 5 minutes, tenth of an hour or quarter hour, which federal rules allow if it averages out (29 CFR 785.48). Use Round start and end to to match your employer’s clock.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s breaks page has the federal rules; several states require meal or rest breaks on top of them.

Common work weeks

Adding weekly hours in Excel

Put each day’s start in A, end in B and break minutes in C:

• Hours per day: =MOD(B2-A2,1)*24-C2/60 (MOD handles night shifts).
• Week total in decimal hours: =SUM(D2:D8).
• Week total as hours and minutes: sum the times and format the cell as [h]:mm — without the brackets Excel drops every full 24 hours, so 40:00 shows as 16:00.

To add up hours and minutes from several weeks, the time calculator takes a list of durations.