HOURS CALCULATOR

If the end time is earlier than the start time, this calculator assumes the shift ran overnight and adds a day — so 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM correctly reads as 8 hours, not a negative number. That's the single most common place hand-math goes wrong on a timesheet. If a shift is genuinely longer than 24 hours, split it into separate entries.

Subtracting a break here gives you worked hours, but whether that break is paid depends on the rules that apply to you. Under U.S. federal law short breaks (roughly 5–20 minutes) are typically paid, while a genuine meal break of 30+ minutes usually isn't — and several states add their own requirements. This tool does the arithmetic; it doesn't decide which breaks your employer counts, so check the policy that governs your timesheet.

Payroll systems run on decimal hours, not minutes: 8 hours 30 minutes is 8.5 hours, because 30 minutes is half an hour. The trap is the middle — 8 hours 20 minutes is 8.33 hours, not 8.20. This calculator shows both forms so you can enter the decimal figure a payroll sheet expects and still see the human-readable hours-and-minutes.

Many U.S. employers legally round clock-in times to the nearest quarter-hour using the "7-minute rule": 1–7 minutes past the quarter round down, 8–14 round up. Over a single day it's noise, but across a year of shifts consistent rounding in one direction adds up. This page gives you the exact, unrounded figure — a useful check against what a timeclock reports. Turning hours into a bigger savings goal? Our savings calculator shows what a set amount grows into.

Under U.S. federal law, overtime for covered non-exempt employees is time-and-a-half for hours worked beyond 40 in a workweek — and a workweek is a fixed, recurring period of seven consecutive 24-hour days that the employer designates in advance. The practical consequence catches people out on biweekly payroll: 30 hours one week and 50 the next is not 80 straight hours, it is 70 regular plus 10 at overtime rate, because the weeks are counted separately. A handful of states add daily overtime on top — California, for instance, applies it after 8 hours in a day. This calculator gives you clean weekly totals to check a payslip against; what your specific job is entitled to depends on your state and your classification.

The standard full-time year is 2,080 hours — 40 hours × 52 weeks — which makes the conversion easy in both directions. Multiply an hourly rate by 2,080 for a rough annual gross, or divide a salary by 2,080 to see what it works out to per hour. Two caveats worth holding on to. First, 2,080 assumes you are paid for holidays and vacation; if you are not, your real paid hours are perhaps 250 lower and your effective rate is higher than the simple division suggests. Second, it ignores benefits entirely — which is exactly why comparing a contract hourly rate against a salaried role on this number alone tends to flatter the contract.

If you invoice by time rather than clock in, the rounding convention matters more than the raw total. Lawyers and many consultants bill in tenths of an hour — six-minute blocks — so eight minutes of work becomes 0.2 rather than 0.13. Others use quarter-hour minimums, which turns a two-minute phone call into fifteen billable minutes. Neither is dishonest as long as it is stated in the engagement terms, but the difference across a year is substantial: quarter-hour rounding on frequent short tasks can inflate a total by a tenth or more. Use the decimal figure above as your true baseline, then apply whatever increment you have agreed.

This is the one almost every timesheet gets wrong. On the spring daylight saving transition the day is 23 hours; on the autumn one it is 25. An overnight shift spanning the change is genuinely an hour shorter or longer than the clock times suggest — 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM is seven hours in March and nine in November. U.S. federal rules require paying for hours actually worked, so the autumn shift earns the extra hour. This calculator works from the clock times you enter, so on those two dates adjust manually. Working across zones rather than across a transition is a different problem, and our time zone converter handles that one.

"Full-time" has no single legal definition, which is why the same 32-hour week can be full-time to one employer and part-time to another. The threshold that carries real weight is the Affordable Care Act's, which treats 30 hours a week — or 130 hours a month — as full-time for employer health coverage purposes at applicable large employers. Internally, staffing is usually expressed in FTE: a 40-hour week is 1.0, twenty hours is 0.5. If your hours hover near a threshold, the weekly and monthly totals from this page are worth keeping, because eligibility is assessed on measured hours rather than on a job title.