Time Card Calculator

This time card calculator turns a week of start times, end times and unpaid breaks into daily hours, a weekly total, and a clean split between regular and overtime. The threshold where overtime begins is 40 hours a week by default and the multiplier is 1.5, both editable. Add an hourly rate and the hours become gross pay. Overnight shifts work too: when the end time is earlier than the start, the tool assumes you crossed midnight instead of handing you a negative number.

Everything runs in your browser and nothing is uploaded. That matters more here than on most tools, because a time card is a record of where one specific person was on specific days. If you bill your time instead of clocking it, the freelance rate calculator is probably the tool you actually want.

How to use

1. Enter the start time and end time for each day you worked, keeping the same 12 or 24 hour format all the way down.
2. Type the unpaid break for that day in minutes, so a 30 minute lunch comes straight off that day's total.
3. Leave days off blank. Blank rows count as zero and do not drag the weekly total around.
4. Check the overtime threshold and change it if your rules start somewhere other than 40 hours a week.
5. Set the overtime multiplier, which is 1.5 for standard time and a half.
6. Add your hourly rate if you want gross pay, then read the regular hours, overtime hours and totals.
7. Compare the result against your paycheck or your employer's system before you raise it with anyone.

Why use our time card calculator?

I built this after a month of squinting at a paper time card and getting a different answer every time I added it up. The number I got wrong first was the break. I had been subtracting a flat 30 minutes out of habit while actually taking closer to 45, and once the real minutes had a field of their own the weekly total moved further than I was comfortable with. Breaks deserve their own column.

The overnight case is where mental math fails hardest. A shift from 11:00 pm to 7:00 am is eight hours, but subtract those clock times the naive way and you get negative sixteen. The tool sees an end time earlier than the start, adds the day boundary, and reports 8.00. Nobody working nights should need modular arithmetic to check their own pay.

Overtime rules vary far more than a single default suggests. The federal FLSA standard is hours over 40 in a workweek at one and a half times the regular rate for non-exempt employees, set out on the Department of Labor overtime page. Some states go further: California pays daily overtime past 8 hours in one day, which no weekly threshold catches. Exempt roles differ again, which is why the threshold and the multiplier are editable fields rather than numbers I decided for you.

What I refuse to add is anything that looks like payroll. No tax withholding, no deductions, no state rule engine pretending to know your classification. This is arithmetic for checking a paycheck, not payroll software and not legal advice. The moment a free tool prints net pay, people trust it for decisions it has no business informing. If you want an hourly rate as an annual figure, the salary converter does that.

Hours come out as decimals, because decimals are what pay math runs on. Eight hours and 45 minutes is 8.75, not 8.45, and confusing those two is the most common time card error I have run into.

Who is this tool for?

The everyday case is checking a paycheck. Say you worked 43.5 hours at $22 an hour. The first 40 hours are $880, the extra 3.5 hours at time and a half come to $33 an hour or $115.50, and gross pay is $995.50. If the stub says something different, you have a specific figure to ask about.

Contractors who bill hourly use it as the step before invoicing. Fill in the week, read the total, and carry that number over to the invoice generator so the hours on the bill match the hours actually worked. I do this every Friday and it takes under two minutes.

Small employers with a few staff use it as a sanity check rather than a system. Before hours go into payroll, someone adds a week up independently and sees whether the two numbers agree. Catching a mistyped clock-out on Thursday is cheap. Catching it three pay periods later is not.

It also earns its keep on weeks that are not normal weeks: split shifts, a Saturday call-out, a day that started at 6:00 am and ended at 2:30 pm with a 20 minute break. Those are precisely the weeks that get argued over, and a per-day breakdown you can point at settles it faster than memory does.

Frequently asked questions