Productivity
Timesheet Calculator
Enter start and finish times with breaks to get daily and weekly totals, plus billable value at your rate.
Overview
Why use a free timesheet calculator?
This free timesheet calculator adds up a week of work. Enter a start and finish for each day, deduct any unpaid break, and every day and the week total appear as both clock time and decimal hours.
Showing both is the point. Minutes are sixtieths of an hour while money is hundredths of a unit, so a shift of 7 hours 45 minutes is 7.75 hours, not 7.45. Reading 7:45 off a clock and typing it straight into a payroll box or an invoice line loses 18 minutes of pay, every time it happens, and nothing in the process flags it.
Times can be entered however you naturally write them: 9:00, 9am, 09.00 or 0900 all work. A finish earlier than the start is read as a night shift crossing midnight rather than as a mistake, and days read that way are marked so you can check.
Nothing is uploaded. The week is calculated in your browser and never transmitted or stored, which also means closing the tab clears it: export the CSV if you need to keep it.
Step by step
How to add up work hours correctly
Enter your times
Type a start and finish for each day you worked. Almost any format is understood: 9:00, 9am, 0900 or 17:30.
Deduct unpaid breaks
Add the unpaid break in minutes for any day that had one. Paid breaks stay in the total, so leave those out.
Read both totals
Each day and the week show as clock time and as decimal hours. Copy the decimal figure into payroll or an invoice, or export the week as a CSV.
What you get
- Clock and decimal hours side by side
- Daily and weekly totals
- Unpaid break deduction
- Weekly overtime threshold and multiplier
- Billable value at your hourly rate
- Export to CSV
Background
Why 7:45 is 7.75 hours, not 7.45
Converting a clock figure into a decimal one is a division by 60, and skipping it is the most common error on any timesheet, not because the arithmetic is difficult, but because the two numbers look so similar that nothing prompts you to convert at all.
The quarter hours are the ones people know: 15 minutes is 0.25, 30 is 0.5, 45 is 0.75. Everything else is less friendly. Ten minutes is 0.17 hours, 20 is 0.33, 25 is 0.42, and 50 is 0.83. Across a week of ragged start and finish times, converting each of those by hand is where the error accumulates.
The direction of the mistake is not random. Because every minutes figure above 60 hundredths is understated when read as a decimal, treating clock time as decimal always produces a number lower than the truth for the busiest part of the hour. On a 40-hour week with 45-minute overruns, the difference is a couple of hours of unbilled work a month: for a contractor at any normal rate, that is real money going missing quietly and repeatedly.
Rounding is the other half of the problem. Many employers round each shift to the nearest quarter hour, which is lawful in a lot of places provided it is neutral: rounding both up and down so it evens out over time. Rounding that only ever goes down is a different thing entirely. Working from exact minutes and rounding once at the end, rather than nudging each day, keeps the total honest and keeps it checkable.
Not to be confused with
- Decimal hours
- Hours expressed in hundredths, which is what every payroll and invoicing system multiplies by a rate. This is the number to copy out of a timesheet, and the one this calculator shows beside every clock figure.
- Clock time
- Hours and minutes as a clock shows them, written 7:45. Useful for checking against your memory of the day and useless for multiplying by a rate. The colon is the reminder: where you see one, the number is not ready for arithmetic.
- Paid and unpaid breaks
- An unpaid meal break comes out of the total; short paid rest breaks stay in. Only unpaid minutes belong in the break column. Getting this backwards is the second most common timesheet error, and unlike the decimal problem it can go either way.
- Billable hours
- Time you can actually charge a client, which is usually less than time worked: admin, travel and rework often are not billable. This calculator totals hours worked; deciding which of them are billable is a separate judgement, and worth making before invoicing rather than after.
- Overtime
- Hours above a threshold, paid at a multiplier. This tool applies a weekly threshold. Daily overtime rules also exist in some places, and combining daily with weekly correctly means avoiding counting the same hour twice, so check those separately rather than assuming a weekly total covers them.
- A time clock or attendance system
- Records when people actually badge in and out, and is the source of truth in a dispute. A calculator adds up what you tell it. Where an employer runs a time clock, reconcile against it rather than against memory, because memory rounds generously in both directions.
Reference
What goes into a week
Most of what makes a timesheet wrong is not arithmetic. It is deciding what counts, and being consistent about it from one week to the next.
Start and finish times
The actual times, not the scheduled ones. Rostered 9 to 5 and worked 8:45 to 17:30 are different weeks, and the gap between them is exactly the time that goes unpaid when timesheets are filled in from the rota.
Required
Unpaid breaks
In minutes, and only the unpaid ones. A 30 or 60 minute meal break is usually unpaid; short rest breaks usually are not. Whichever applies, apply it the same way every week or the totals cannot be compared.
Required
Overnight shifts
A finish earlier than the start is read as crossing midnight, so 22:00 to 06:00 is eight hours. Days read that way are marked. Check the marking rather than the total if a night shift looks wrong.
Optional
The overtime threshold
Hours per week above which overtime applies, commonly 40. Set it to whatever your contract or jurisdiction says rather than to a habit, and remember it is applied weekly here.
Optional
The overtime multiplier
Usually 1.5 for time and a half, sometimes 2 for double time. Contracts vary more than people expect, particularly for weekends and public holidays, so check rather than assume.
Optional
Your hourly rate
Optional, and useful for sanity-checking a payslip or pricing a project. Use the gross rate before deductions; what arrives in a bank account is a different number entirely.
Optional
Travel time
Often paid, often forgotten, and the rules differ between commuting and travel between sites during a working day. Where it counts, enter it as its own row rather than stretching a shift to cover it.
Optional
On-call and standby
Frequently paid at a different rate from worked hours, so it does not belong in the same total. Keep it on a separate timesheet if the rates differ, or the weekly figure will not reconcile against the payslip.
Optional
Public holidays and leave
Paid time that was not worked. Including it inflates hours worked and can push a week over an overtime threshold it never really crossed. Record it separately from time at work.
Optional
Who it helps
Who needs to calculate work hours?
Freelancers and contractors
Hours turn directly into an invoice, so the decimal conversion is the difference between being paid for the work and quietly discounting it. A week of shifts ending at quarter past and half past is exactly where hand-converted hours drift downward.
Hourly workers checking a payslip
Payslips arrive as a total with no working shown. Adding up your own week from the times you actually started and finished is the only way to know whether the figure is right, and it takes a couple of minutes.
Small business owners running payroll
Paper timesheets and photographed rotas have to become decimal hours before they can go anywhere near payroll. Doing that conversion once, visibly, is faster than doing it in your head per employee and hoping.
Agencies billing client time
Time recorded against several clients has to add up to the week and be defensible line by line. Exact minutes with a single conversion at the end survives a client query in a way that per-day rounding does not.
Shift and night workers
Shifts that cross midnight break naive spreadsheets, which return negative hours or silently drop the day. A calculator that reads 22:00 to 06:00 as eight hours removes the most annoying part of a night-shift timesheet.
Anyone tracking overtime
Overtime only becomes visible once the week is totalled, and by then the decision to work the extra hours has been made. Adding the days up as you go shows the threshold approaching while there is still something you can do about it.
Do it properly
Best practices
Record times as you go, not at the end of the week
Times reconstructed on Friday are rounded, generously and inconsistently, and almost always in the employer's favour. Noting the actual start and finish each day takes seconds and is the single biggest improvement to any timesheet.
Keep exact minutes and round only at the end
Rounding each day to the nearest quarter hour compounds across a week and the drift is rarely symmetrical. Total the exact minutes first; if a rounded figure is needed, round the total once and you can still show the working.
Be consistent about breaks
Whether a meal break is deducted matters less than deducting it the same way every week. Inconsistent break handling is what makes two weeks impossible to compare and makes a query impossible to answer.
Separate hours worked from hours billed
They are rarely equal, and blurring them makes both numbers useless. Total the time actually worked first, then decide what is billable: doing it in that order means the decision is visible rather than baked in.
Check the total against the payslip, not the other way round
Working forwards from your own record and comparing to what was paid is how discrepancies get found. Starting from the payslip and trying to justify it finds nothing, because any total can be made to look plausible.
Keep the export
Nothing here is stored, so the week disappears when the tab closes. Exporting the CSV gives you a dated record in a form a spreadsheet or an accountant can read, which is what you need if the hours are ever questioned.
Avoid these
Common mistakes
Entering 7.45 for a shift of 7 hours 45 minutes
The decimal figure is 7.75. This single error costs 18 minutes of pay per occurrence and is invisible once the number is in a payroll system.
Filling in the timesheet from the rota
Record what actually happened. Scheduled hours and worked hours diverge in the direction of more work, not less, and a timesheet copied from a schedule is a record of what was planned rather than of what you are owed.
Rounding every day to the nearest quarter hour
Total the exact minutes and round once at the end if you have to. Per-day rounding compounds, and where it consistently goes one way it stops being rounding and becomes a systematic deduction.
Deducting paid rest breaks along with the unpaid meal break
Only unpaid minutes come out. Short paid rest breaks are working time in most arrangements, and removing them is giving away time nobody asked you to give.
Assuming a spreadsheet handles a night shift
Subtracting 22:00 from 06:00 gives minus sixteen hours in most spreadsheets, and the usual reaction is to retype the day rather than fix the formula. A finish before a start means the shift crossed midnight, and should be read as eight hours.
Counting holiday and sick leave as hours worked
Keep paid leave separate. Mixing it in inflates the hours-worked figure and can push a week over an overtime threshold it never actually crossed, which then has to be unpicked.
Treating a weekly overtime total as covering every overtime rule
Some jurisdictions and contracts also pay daily overtime: above eight hours in a day, for instance. A weekly threshold will not surface those hours. Check the rules that apply to you rather than assuming one calculation covers both.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
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