Hours Calculator

How to use the hours calculator

Type a start time and an end time for each day. The calculator accepts 9:00, 9am, 9:00 AM, 17:30 and 5:30 pm, so use whatever you have on your notes or timesheet. Put unpaid breaks in minutes in the Break column. The Hours column updates as you type, in decimal hours and in hours and minutes, and the green bar at the bottom keeps a running total across every day you add.

Need more than one day? Click Add a day. Working nights? Enter the real times, such as 10:00 pm to 6:00 am, and the calculator knows the shift crossed midnight. If a break is longer than the shift it will tell you instead of showing a negative number.

Worked example

Say you worked Monday from 8:30 am to 5:15 pm with a 45 minute lunch. The raw span is 8 hours 45 minutes. Take away the 45 minute break and you get 8 hours, or 8.00 in decimal. Tuesday you started at 9:10 am, finished at 4:52 pm and skipped lunch. That is 7 hours 42 minutes, or 7.70 hours. Two days total 15 hours 42 minutes, which the calculator shows as 15.70 h (15:42).

Rounding changes that. With rounding set to the nearest 15 minutes, Tuesday's 7:42 becomes 7:45 and the total becomes 15.75. With 6 minute rounding, 7:42 stays 7:42 because it already sits on a tenth of an hour. Pick the increment your client or payroll uses, and pick it before you send the numbers.

Decimal hours vs hours and minutes

Timesheets are written in hours and minutes. Invoices and payroll are calculated in decimal hours. The conversion trips people up because 7:30 is 7.5 hours, not 7.3. The rule is simple: divide the minutes by 60. Fifteen minutes is 0.25, thirty is 0.5, forty-five is 0.75, and six minutes is exactly 0.1. The calculator shows both so you can copy whichever one the form in front of you wants.

Turning hours into pay

Open Calculate pay, enter your hourly rate, and the calculator multiplies it out. If overtime applies, set the daily threshold (8 hours is the common one) and the multiplier (1.5 is standard time and a half). Any day that runs past the threshold splits into regular and overtime hours, and the gross total is shown at the bottom. If you are a freelancer or contractor who bills by the hour rather than an employee, leave the threshold blank and the whole total is charged at your rate.

Common mistakes

• Forgetting am and pm. If you type 5:00 and mean the afternoon, write 5pm or 17:00. Plain 5:00 is five in the morning.
• Entering breaks in hours. The Break column is minutes. A one hour lunch is 60.
• Rounding after totalling. Rounding is applied to each day, then the days are added. That is what most payroll rules require and it is how this calculator works.
• Mixing paid and unpaid breaks. Only subtract breaks you are not paid for.

Other free tools

If you need a full week with pay, use the time card calculator. For punch-clock style hours with overtime and 15 minute rounding, use the time clock calculator. Freelancers totalling billable hours for a client should try the timesheet calculator, then work out what those hours need to earn with the yearly revenue goal calculator. Harpoon's built-in time tracking replaces all of this once you are ready to stop doing it by hand.