A weekly timesheet, not a stopwatch
This is a time card: a week of work laid out as seven rows of clock-in, clock-out and break, totalled into hours and gross pay. It exists because the neighbouring tools answer different questions. The Time Duration Calculator measures the gap between two timestamps — how long a journey, a process or an interval lasted. The Time Calculator adds and subtracts lengths of time, hours and minutes as abstract quantities. Neither of them knows what a working week is. This page does: it knows that a day with no times is a day off, that breaks come out of the shift rather than extending it, that a clock-out before the clock-in means someone worked through midnight, and that the week's total has to come out two ways — as clock time (40h 0m) for humans and as decimal hours (40.00) for payroll, because multiplying clock time by an hourly rate is where hand-kept timesheets quietly go wrong.
How each day is counted
Every row follows the same three steps, shown for your own numbers in the panel below the results. First the shift length: clock-out minus clock-in, with 24 hours added if the result is negative, which is how overnight shifts are handled without any special mode. Second, the break: the minutes you enter are subtracted, because an unpaid lunch inside a shift is not worked time — if your breaks are paid, enter 0 and they stay in. Third, a floor: a day can never count less than zero, so a break longer than the shift produces 0, not a negative debt carried into the week. Blank rows count as days off and are labelled as such in the table. The default week — five days of 9:00 to 17:30 with a 30-minute break — works out to exactly 8 hours a day, 40 hours and 2,400 minutes for the week, $800 gross at $20 an hour, which is a useful reference: if your own week surprises you, compare it row by row against that shape.
Decimal hours, and the mistake they prevent
Payroll does not run on hours and minutes; it runs on decimal hours, because only a decimal can be multiplied by a rate. The conversion is exact but unintuitive: 15 minutes is 0.25 of an hour, 30 minutes is 0.50, 45 is 0.75 — and 40 minutes is 0.67, not 0.40. The classic timesheet error is writing 7 hours 40 minutes as 7.40 hours, which underpays by 16 minutes; repeated across a month of shifts it becomes real money in someone's pocket going the wrong way. This page converts from the true minute total, so the decimal figure is always the honest one, and the gross pay shown is that decimal times your rate — a straight-time figure, before tax, deductions and any overtime premium your employer or jurisdiction adds on top.
Worked example
The default card: Monday to Friday, 9:00 in, 17:30 out, 30 minutes of break. Each shift is 8 hours 30 minutes long; minus the break, 8 paid hours. Five identical days give 40h 0m = 2,400 minutes = 40.00 decimal hours, and at $20 an hour the gross pay is $800. Saturday and Sunday are blank — days off, contributing nothing.
How to use this calculator
- For each day you worked, enter the clock-in and clock-out times.
- Enter the unpaid break minutes for that day (0 if breaks are paid, or the day was off).
- Leave days off completely blank — they count as zero, automatically.
- Enter your hourly rate.
- Read the week's total as clock time in the headline, decimal hours and gross pay in the stats, and each day's hours in the table.
Overtime, rounding and honest limits
Two things this card deliberately does not do. First, overtime: many workplaces pay a premium (commonly time-and-a-half) past 40 hours in a week or 8 in a day, but the threshold and the rate vary by employer, contract and jurisdiction, so rather than guess yours, the card reports straight-time gross pay and leaves the premium visible for you to add: at time-and-a-half, each hour past your threshold earns an extra half-rate on top of the figure shown. Second, rounding: some employers round clock times to the nearest quarter hour. This card counts the exact times you enter; if your workplace rounds, round each clock-in and clock-out to its nearest quarter before entering it, and the totals will match your payslip's method. What the card guarantees is the arithmetic in between — minutes, decimals and pay derived from one true total, so the three can never disagree with each other.