Time Card Calculator

How to add up a weekly time card

A time card is a record of when work started, when it stopped, and what was not paid in between. Totalling one by hand takes four steps, and the same four steps apply whether the card is paper, a spreadsheet or a punch clock export.

1. Work out the elapsed time for each shift, from clock-in to clock-out.
2. Subtract any unpaid break taken during that shift.
3. Convert every daily total into decimal hours.
4. Add the daily decimals to get a weekly total, then split that total into straight time and overtime.

The order matters. Breaks come off the shift before the daily figure is converted, and the weekly total is built from daily figures that have already been converted. Adding raw hours and minutes across seven days is where most manual errors start.

Converting clock time to decimal hours

This is the single biggest trap on a time card. Clock time is base 60. Money is base 10. A shift of 7 hours and 45 minutes is 7.75 hours, not 7.45 hours. Writing 7.45 understates the day by 18 minutes, and repeated across a week it can cost an employee more than an hour of pay.

Only four conversions are exact at two decimal places: 15 minutes is 0.25, 30 minutes is 0.50, 45 minutes is 0.75 and 60 minutes is 1.00. Everything else repeats. Payroll systems normally carry more decimal places internally and round only the final dollar amount, which is why a hand-checked total can differ from a payslip by a cent or two.

Minutes to decimal reference table

Unpaid breaks

Federal wage and hour rules treat short rest breaks and meal periods differently. Rest breaks of roughly 20 minutes or less are generally counted as hours worked and are paid. A bona fide meal period, normally 30 minutes or longer, during which the employee is completely relieved of duty, is generally unpaid and is deducted from the shift.

The word bona fide carries weight. An employee who eats at a desk while still answering phones, watching a register or covering a line is not completely relieved of duty, and that time is generally compensable even if it was recorded as a lunch. Automatic meal deductions applied by a clock system are a common source of back pay claims when staff routinely work through the deduction.

• Deduct the break from the shift it was taken in, not from the weekly total.
• Record the actual break length. A 22 minute lunch is not a 30 minute lunch.
• Several states set their own meal and rest break requirements that are stricter than the federal baseline.

Overnight and graveyard shifts

When a shift crosses midnight the clock-out time is numerically smaller than the clock-in time. Subtracting directly gives a negative number, so add 24 hours to the clock-out before subtracting.

The other question an overnight shift raises is which day, and which workweek, the hours belong to. The usual practice is to assign the entire shift to the day it started, and to apply that rule consistently. It matters most at the seam between two workweeks, because a shift that starts Saturday night and ends Sunday morning could otherwise be counted in either week and change the overtime calculation.

Overtime under federal law

The Fair Labor Standards Act requires covered, non-exempt employees to be paid at least one and a half times their regular rate for hours worked over 40 in a single workweek. That is the federal rule in full. There is no federal daily overtime requirement, no federal rule that a long day by itself triggers a premium, and no federal weekend or holiday premium.

Daily overtime is a state matter. California is the best known example: over 8 hours in a workday is paid at 1.5x, over 12 hours in a workday at 2x, and the seventh consecutive day in a workweek carries its own premium rules. Alaska, Nevada, Colorado and a handful of others have their own daily thresholds. Check the rule for the state where the work is actually performed.

Overtime is calculated on the regular rate, which is not always the base hourly rate. Nondiscretionary bonuses, shift differentials and most production or attendance incentives have to be folded into the regular rate before the premium is worked out. A flat hourly wage with no extras is the simple case, and it is the case this calculator assumes.

What counts as a workweek

A workweek is any fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 consecutive hours, which is seven consecutive 24 hour periods. It does not have to be Monday to Sunday and it does not have to line up with the calendar week or the pay period. An employer can define it as Thursday 00:00 through Wednesday 23:59 if that suits the operation.

Once set, a workweek should stay fixed. Changing it is permitted if the change is intended to be permanent, but a workweek that moves around from period to period, especially in a way that reduces overtime, invites scrutiny.

Rounding practice

Rounding recorded time is a long standing payroll practice. The most common form is quarter-hour rounding, often called the 7 minute rule: punches within 7 minutes of a quarter-hour mark round down to it, and punches 8 to 14 minutes past round up to the next quarter hour.

Rounding is only defensible when it is neutral. It has to be applied the same way at clock-in and clock-out, and over time it must not systematically favour the employer. A policy that rounds start times up to the next quarter hour but rounds end times down is not neutral, and neither is a practice that rounds in the employer's favour because employees are told to clock in early and start work immediately. Some employers have moved to exact minute recording to remove the question entirely.

Record keeping

Employers covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act must keep basic payroll records for at least three years. Records on which wage computations are based, which includes time cards, work schedules and records of additions to or deductions from wages, must be kept for at least two years. There is no required format, but the records must show hours worked each day and total hours each workweek.

• Employee name, address, occupation, sex and date of birth if under 19.
• The time and day the workweek begins.
• Hours worked each day and total hours each workweek.
• Basis of pay, regular hourly rate, straight time earnings and overtime earnings.
• Total wages per pay period, date of payment and the pay period covered.

Keeping the underlying punches, not just the weekly totals, is what makes a time card defensible later. When a dispute arises the employer generally carries the burden of producing accurate records.

Worked example

A full time employee works 9:00 to 17:00, Monday through Friday, with a 30 minute unpaid lunch each day, at $20.00 per hour.

Each shift is 8 hours elapsed. Subtracting the 30 minute unpaid lunch leaves 7 hours 30 minutes, which converts to 7.50 decimal hours. Five days at 7.50 gives 37.50 hours for the week. Because 37.50 is under 40, no overtime is owed under federal law.

If the same employee worked an extra 4 hour Saturday shift, the week would total 41.50 hours. The first 40 hours would be paid at $20.00 for $800.00, and the remaining 1.50 hours at $30.00 for $45.00, giving $845.00 gross.