Time card calculator

Plenty of free tools stop at a column of hours. That number is necessary but it is not what lands in a bank account. Two people can both work 50 hours in a week and be owed different amounts: one worked five ten-hour days in Texas, the other worked the same days in California. Under the federal rule the first has 10 overtime hours; the second has 10, all earned day by day, because California counts every hour past 8 in a workday. At $20 an hour the gap is $0 for the week, or the price of a tank of gas every Friday.

The time card on this page therefore carries the rule with the hours. Pick the state and the thresholds follow; type a rate and the gross pay follows. Nothing has to be configured by hand, which is where most mistakes on homemade spreadsheets begin: a daily threshold typed as 8 for a Colorado worker, or a weekly threshold forgotten for a California one.

Each field accepts what people actually write on paper: 8, 830, 8:30, 8.30, 2:15pm or 14:15. Without "am" or "pm", a time is read on the 24-hour clock, so 7 is seven in the morning and 19 is seven in the evening, the same convention as military time. If the out time is earlier than the in time, the shift is counted into the next day: 10 pm to 6:30 am gives eight and a half hours, not a negative number. A field that cannot be read turns amber instead of silently counting zero.

Leave a day blank when you did not work. The breakdown under the result shows the shift as it was counted, after rounding, so you can compare it line by line with a pay stub or a punch report. For split shifts with several punches in one day, the time clock calculator takes up to three in and out pairs.

Federal law does not oblige an employer to give breaks, but it decides how they are paid when they are given. The Department of Labor's rule on rest periods says short breaks of about 5 to 20 minutes are customarily paid and must be counted as hours worked. A bona fide meal period is different: when you are completely relieved of duty, ordinarily for 30 minutes or more, it is not work time. Eating at your desk while answering the phone is work.

That is why the break column of the time card is labeled "unpaid": type the meal period you clocked out for, not the coffee break. California and Colorado go further and require meal and rest periods; when an employer misses one in California, the worker is owed one extra hour of pay at the regular rate for that day, which the breaks guide explains with the state texts.

Many time clocks record starting and stopping times to the nearest 5 minutes, tenth of an hour or quarter hour. The federal regulation on time clocks accepts the practice for enforcement purposes provided it does not, over time, fail to pay employees for the time they actually worked. In practice, rounding to the nearest quarter hour sends 1 to 7 minutes down and 8 to 14 minutes up.

Take a worker who punches in at 7:53 and out at 4:38 with a 30-minute lunch. Exactly, that is 8:15 of work. Rounded to the quarter, the punches become 8:00 AM and 4:45 PM, and the day counts 8:15. Over a year the small gains and losses should cancel out; if they always run one way, the practice no longer meets the rule. The rounding guide works through the arithmetic and the cases where it goes wrong.

The FLSA measures overtime in a workweek, which the Department of Labor defines as a fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 hours, seven consecutive 24-hour periods. It does not have to start on Sunday or Monday, and hours cannot be averaged over two weeks: 50 hours one week and 30 the next earn ten hours of overtime, even though the pair totals 80. A biweekly paycheck covers two separate workweeks, which is why the two-week timesheet splits overtime week by week.

The "workweek starts on" setting lets you match your employer's choice, Sunday or Monday. It matters for California's seventh-day rule, which looks at seven consecutive days of work inside one workweek, and for any week where a long weekend shift could fall on either side of the line.

The result is an estimate of hours and gross pay before taxes. It assumes you are a nonexempt employee covered by the federal law and, if you choose a state, by its wage order. Several things move a real paycheck that a time card cannot see: an approved alternative workweek in California, a flexible work hour plan in Alaska that sets daily overtime at 10 hours, bonuses and shift differentials that raise the regular rate (the regular rate page shows how), union contracts, and exemptions for some occupations.

Salaried workers are not automatically exempt either. Under the federal salary test the pay must reach at least $684 a week, $35,568 a year, and the duties must qualify; California sets its own floor at $70,304 for 2026. The exempt versus nonexempt page explains both tests. When the time card and a pay stub disagree, the first step is to ask payroll which workweek and which rule they applied.

Hours are only half of payroll planning; dates are the other half. There are 250 working days in 2026 once the eleven federal holidays observed by the Office of Personnel Management are removed from the 261 weekdays, which is 2,000 hours for a full-time schedule of eight-hour days. Independence Day falls on a Saturday this year, so the federal day off is Friday, July 3.

The working days calculator gives the count month by month, the business days calculator counts any two dates, and the salary to hourly calculator shows both the 2,080-hour year used by most employers and the 2,087-hour divisor that federal agencies apply under 5 U.S.C. 5504.