Loading Time Card Calculator…
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$0.00
An end time earlier than the start is treated as an overnight shift. Overtime rules vary by state and country — check the rule that applies to you.
Anyone paid by the hour and anyone who signs off on hours: shift workers checking a payslip, small-business owners running payroll without software, contractors billing a client by the week, and managers approving a paper time sheet. The arithmetic is easy in principle and error-prone in practice, because clock times are base 60, payroll wants base 10, and overtime is decided by rules that differ between one state and the next.
Take a week of 08:00 starts with a 30-minute unpaid lunch: finishing at 16:30 Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 18:00 on Tuesday and 17:00 on Thursday. That is 8.00, 9.50, 8.00, 8.50 and 8.00 hours — 42.00 hours for the week.
Under the "over 40 hours a week" rule, 40 hours are regular and 2 are overtime: $800.00 plus $60.00 at time and a half, for $860.00 gross. Under the "over 8 a day, or 40 a week" rule you get the same $860.00, but by a different route — Tuesday contributes 1.5 daily overtime hours and Thursday 0.5, which is the same 2 hours.
The two rules part company on a compressed schedule. Four 10-hour days is exactly 40 hours: the weekly rule finds no overtime at all and pays $800.00, while the daily rule finds 2 overtime hours on each of the four days — 8 hours in total — and pays 32 × $20 + 8 × $30 = $880.00. Same hours worked, $80 apart.
Each shift is measured in whole minutes: end time minus start time, minus the unpaid break, then divided by 60 to give decimal hours. An end time earlier than the start is read as an overnight shift rather than a negative day, so 22:00 to 06:30 with a 30-minute break is 480 minutes, or 8.00 hours, not minus 16.
The two rules are not preferences; they are jurisdictions.
Everything here is gross pay. Tax, national insurance, benefits and garnishments are not modelled, so the figure is the top line of a payslip and never the amount that lands. Breaks are treated as unpaid whenever you enter them; paid rest breaks should simply be left out of the break box. Shift differentials, premium rates for weekends or public holidays, on-call time and tipped-wage credits are all outside what a time card can express.
Because payroll runs on decimal hours. Thirty minutes is half an hour, so it is 0.50, not 0.30. Getting this wrong understates a half-hour shift by twelve minutes of pay every time, which is why the tool shows decimal hours, hours-and-minutes and total minutes side by side.
If it is unpaid, yes — enter it in the break column and it is deducted. Short paid rest breaks stay in the shift and should not be entered. Under the FLSA, breaks under about 20 minutes are generally compensable and a bona fide meal period of 30 minutes or more generally is not.
An end time before the start time is treated as crossing midnight, so 22:00 to 06:30 counts as 8.5 hours before breaks. Which day the hours belong to for the overtime threshold is your employer’s policy; the tool credits them to the row you typed them in.