Work Hours Calculator

Your Weekly Timesheet

Minutes to Decimal-Hours Conversion Table

Payroll stores 8 hours 30 minutes as 8.50, not 8.30. Divide minutes by 60 to convert. Use this lookup to verify your punch-card math by hand.

Need to turn those hours into pay? Use the Salary to Hourly Calculator or the reverse Hourly to Salary Calculator.

The Work-Hours Formula

Overtime & Standard-Hours Reference

No saved weeks yet. Tap "Save This Week to History" to remember up to six timesheets and compare a light week against an overtime week.

How to Total Your Week on the Punch Card

1. For each working day, enter the clock-in time in the first column and the clock-out time in the second. Leave days off blank — they read as a dash.
2. Enter unpaid break minutes (typically a 30-minute lunch) in the Break column. The tool subtracts them from that day's paid hours per FLSA 29 CFR 785.19.
3. Read each day's decimal hours in the right column; days over eight hours turn orange. An overnight shift like 22:00 to 06:00 is auto-corrected by adding 24 hours.
4. Check the weekly bar and the Regular / Overtime / Total strip. Any hours past 40 appear in the orange overtime tile, owed at 1.5× under FLSA §207.
5. Tap "Save This Week to History" to store the result locally, then start the next week or apply your state's daily-overtime rule to the per-day totals.

Why the 40-Hour Week and the Punch Card Endure

In 2026, an hourly warehouse associate who suspects a short paycheck needs to convert a week of clock-in and clock-out punches into a defensible total of regular and overtime hours before walking into HR. The Work Hours Calculator turns a Monday-to-Sunday punch card into decimal hours, subtracts unpaid meal breaks per FLSA 29 CFR 785.19, and flags every hour past 40 as overtime owed at time-and-a-half. It is built for the moment when getting the arithmetic exactly right protects a real paycheck.

The workweek as a unit of pay is surprisingly modern. Before the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt, there was no federal cap on hours and no overtime premium. The FLSA established the 40-hour workweek and the 1.5× overtime multiplier under 29 U.S.C. §207, administered today by the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division. The 40-hour line is still the single most important number in American payroll, and it is assessed per workweek, never averaged across two weeks.

The mechanical time clock that produced the punch card this tool imitates was patented by Willard Bundy, a jeweler in Auburn, New York, in 1888. His brother Harlow Bundy commercialized it, and the Bundy Manufacturing Company later merged into the firm that became IBM. For nearly a century the stamped card was the legal record of hours worked; the digital timesheet inherited its row-per-day, in-and-out-column structure, which is exactly the grid rendered above.

Converting clock time to payroll requires two transformations that trip people up. First, time that crosses midnight: a shift clocked in at 22:00 and out at 06:00 is eight hours, not a negative number, so the calculator adds 24 hours whenever the out time precedes the in time. Second, the minutes-to-decimal conversion: payroll stores 8 hours 30 minutes as 8.50, dividing minutes by 60, because adding 8.30 and 8.30 in base-60 thinking gives the wrong sum. Both conversions are automatic here.

Rounding is where compliance gets subtle. FLSA 29 CFR 785.48 permits employers to round punches to the nearest quarter-hour under the so-called 7-minute rule: minutes 1 through 7 past a quarter mark round down, 8 through 14 round up. The rule is legal only if it is neutral over time and does not systematically shave employee hours. Because policies vary — some employers round to 5 or 6 minutes — this tool reports exact minutes and leaves rounding to the user's stated policy.

State law layers on top of the federal floor. California, Alaska, Nevada, and a few others mandate daily overtime past 8 hours in a day, and California adds double-time past 12 hours. The FLSA sets only a weekly 40-hour trigger with no daily rule. Where state law is more generous to the worker, it controls. This calculator reports the federal weekly split; workers in daily-overtime states should layer their state rule on the per-day totals shown in the grid.

The standard 2,080-hour work year — 40 hours times 52 weeks — is the bridge between hourly and salaried pay. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management uses it to convert annual salary to an hourly rate, and it is the number behind sibling tools like the Salary to Hourly Calculator and Hourly to Salary Calculator. A weekly timesheet is the atomic unit beneath that annual figure: get the week right, and the year follows.