Time Card Calculator

Background.

This time card calculator turns a single clock-in and clock-out shift, minus an unpaid break, into the numbers every hourly worker and small-business payroll clerk actually needs: hours worked per shift, total hours for the week, and — because the United States pays overtime by the week, not by the day — a split between regular hours and time-and-a-half overtime hours, plus the resulting dollar pay at your hourly rate. Enter your clock-in and clock-out time on a 24-hour clock, the length of your unpaid break, how many days that same shift repeats across your work week, your hourly rate, and whether the federal weekly overtime rule applies, and the calculator does the rest.

The calculator deliberately models one representative shift repeated across a chosen number of workdays rather than asking you to enter seven independent clock-in/clock-out pairs. That is the same simplification every quick timesheet tool makes for its headline widget, because most hourly schedules really are the same shift five (or six, or seven) days running. If your week is genuinely irregular — a Tuesday double shift, a half-day Friday — run the companion `hours-between-times` calculator once per day and add the results, or use `business-days` to first work out how many actual workdays fall in a pay period before you multiply.

The overnight-shift handling is the part most timesheet tools get quietly wrong. A shift that starts at 22:00 and ends at 06:00 the next morning is eight hours, not a negative sixteen. This calculator treats any clock-out time that is numerically at or before the clock-in time as a shift that has crossed midnight, and adds 24 hours before subtracting the break — the same forward-only logic that governs 'days until my next birthday' calculations across this site (never negative, never zero when a real span exists). Night-shift workers, hospital staff, security guards, and restaurant close-out crews are the primary beneficiaries of this detail; day-shift workers will never notice it because their clock-out time is always later than their clock-in time on the same day.

Overtime in the United States is governed by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), 29 U.S.C. § 207(a)(1), which requires covered non-exempt employees to be paid at least one and one-half times their regular rate for every hour worked beyond 40 in a single workweek. Critically, this is a weekly threshold, not a daily one — working a 10-hour Monday and a 6-hour Tuesday triggers no federal overtime by itself; only the weekly total beyond 40 does. (A handful of states, most notably California, layer a daily-overtime rule on top of the federal weekly rule; that state-specific complexity is out of scope for this calculator, which computes the federal FLSA baseline only — check your state labor department if you suspect a daily rule applies to you.) The calculator's 'No overtime rule' option exists for salaried-equivalent arrangements, exempt roles, or contexts (many countries outside the US, freelance billing) where the 40-hour/1.5× rule simply does not apply; selecting it reports every hour at the base rate with no multiplier.

The Department of Labor's timekeeping regulations (29 CFR 785.48) permit employers to round employee time to the nearest 5, 6, 10, or 15 minutes, provided the rounding practice does not, over time, systematically favor the employer — the commonly cited 'quarter-hour rule' rounds punches within 7 minutes down and 8 minutes up. This calculator intentionally reports exact decimal hours from your entered clock times rather than snapping to a rounding increment, because the correct rounding rule depends on your employer's specific timekeeping policy; treat this tool's output as the precise baseline and apply your employer's stated rounding policy afterward if one exists.

What is time card calculator?

A time card (or timesheet) calculator converts the raw clock-in and clock-out times an hourly employee records into payable hours and, ultimately, gross pay for a period. In the United States, 'hours worked' for FLSA purposes means all time an employee is required to be on duty, on the employer's premises, or at a prescribed workplace, minus any bona fide meal periods during which the employee is completely relieved of duty (29 CFR 785.19) — the reason this calculator subtracts an unpaid-break field from the raw shift span before reporting payable hours. The distinction between a shift's raw clock span and its payable hours matters because a break is only deductible if it is truly unpaid and duty-free; a 'break' where the employee must monitor a phone or stay at a register is compensable working time under DOL guidance and should not be entered here as an unpaid break. Weekly overtime, not daily overtime, is the federal default: the FLSA workweek is a fixed, recurring 168-hour period (seven consecutive 24-hour periods) that an employer defines once and does not change to manipulate overtime liability; every hour a covered non-exempt employee works beyond 40 within that single workweek must be paid at 1.5× the regular rate. This calculator's 'daysPerWeek' field lets you model that workweek total from a single representative shift.

How to use this calculator.

1. 01Enter your clock-in time as an hour (0–23) and minute (0–59) on the 24-hour clock — 8:00 AM is hour 8, and 6:00 PM is hour 18.
2. 02Enter your clock-out time the same way. If you work overnight (for example, clocking in at 22 and out at 6), just enter the times as they appear on the clock — the calculator detects the midnight crossing automatically and adds 24 hours.
3. 03Enter your total unpaid break in minutes. This must be strictly less than the total shift span or the calculator will flag the input.
4. 04Enter how many days per week this same shift repeats (1–7).
5. 05Enter your hourly rate and choose whether the federal FLSA weekly overtime rule (1.5× beyond 40 hours/week) applies to your situation.
6. 06Read the primary 'Total pay' figure, then check the 'Regular hours' vs 'Overtime hours' split beneath it to see exactly how the weekly total breaks down.
7. 07If your actual week has different shifts on different days, run this calculator once per distinct shift length and add the weekly totals by hand, or use the hours-between-times calculator per day instead.

The formula.

Step 1 — overnight-safe shift length. rawMinutes = (clockOutHour×60 + clockOutMinute) − (clockInHour×60 + clockInMinute). If rawMinutes is zero or negative, the shift is assumed to cross midnight and 1440 minutes (24 hours) is added. This makes a 22:00→06:00 shift compute as 480 minutes (8 hours), not −960.

Step 2 — net payable minutes. netMinutes = rawMinutes − unpaidBreakMinutes. This must be strictly positive; a break that consumes the entire shift is rejected as invalid input rather than silently producing zero or negative hours.

Step 3 — daily and weekly hours. dailyHours = netMinutes / 60. weeklyHours = dailyHours × daysPerWeek.

Step 4 — overtime split (FLSA weekly rule). If the overtime rule is enabled: regularHours = min(weeklyHours, 40) and overtimeHours = max(weeklyHours − 40, 0). The Fair Labor Standards Act, 29 U.S.C. § 207(a)(1), requires overtime pay of at least 1.5× the regular rate for every hour a covered non-exempt employee works beyond 40 in a single workweek — measured weekly, never averaged across multiple weeks or split by day. If the overtime rule is disabled, regularHours = weeklyHours and overtimeHours = 0.

Step 5 — pay. regularPay = regularHours × hourlyRate. overtimePay = overtimeHours × hourlyRate × 1.5. totalPay = regularPay + overtimePay.

The calculator reports exact decimal hours and does not apply any punch-rounding increment. The Department of Labor's rounding regulation (29 CFR 785.48) permits rounding to the nearest 5, 6, 10, or 15 minutes as a matter of employer administrative convenience, provided it does not systematically shortchange employees over time — but the specific increment and rounding direction are a policy choice for your employer to state, not something this general-purpose calculator should assume on your behalf.

A worked example.

Frequently asked questions.

References& sources.

1. [1]Fair Labor Standards Act, 29 U.S.C. § 207(a)(1) — the federal statute requiring overtime pay of at least 1.5× the regular rate for hours worked beyond 40 in a single workweek.
2. [2]U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division. Fact Sheet #23: Overtime Pay Requirements of the FLSA. Explains the weekly (not daily) overtime threshold and the fixed workweek concept.
3. [3]29 CFR § 785.48 — Code of Federal Regulations. The Department of Labor's rule permitting rounding of employee time to the nearest 5, 6, 10, or 15 minutes, provided it does not systematically favor the employer.
4. [4]29 CFR § 785.19 — Code of Federal Regulations. Defines a bona fide, deductible meal period as one where the employee is completely relieved of duty.
5. [5]U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division. Fact Sheet #17A: Exemption for Executive, Administrative, Professional, Computer & Outside Sales Employees. Reference for whether a role is exempt from FLSA overtime.
6. [6]International Organization for Standardization, ISO 8601-1:2019 — Date and time representations. The 24-hour clock convention this calculator's hour/minute inputs follow.