Work Hours & Pay Calculator

About the Work Hours & Pay Calculator

Type the time you started and the time you finished each day, and put in what you are paid an hour. The hours are worked out as you go, breaks come off, overtime is separated from normal hours, and you get the pay for the week at the bottom.

It is the same sum a paper time card asks you to do in your head, done properly and instantly. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no account to make.

Typing the times

You do not have to type times in one exact shape. All of these work:

• 9 or 9:00 or 0900 — nine in the morning
• 17:30 or 1730 — half past five
• 5:30 pm or 5.30pm — the same thing
• 9:15am and 9.15 am — also fine

When you move to the next box, whatever you typed is tidied into HH:MM.

Shifts that cross midnight

A night shift from 22:00 to 02:00 is four hours, not minus twenty. When the finish time is earlier than the start time, the tool treats it as the next morning and adds the hours the right way round. You do not have to split the shift into two rows or do anything special.

Breaks, overtime and rounding

• Break is in minutes, and it comes straight off that day's total. An eight-and-a-half-hour shift with a 30-minute lunch is eight paid hours.
• Overtime can be counted weekly (anything past 35, 40 or 45 hours in the week) or daily (anything past 8 or 10 hours in a day), which is how the rules usually differ from country to country. Pick the one your employer uses, or turn overtime off.
• The overtime rate multiplies the hourly pay for those hours only — time and a half, double time, or whatever you choose.
• Rounding applies to each shift before the break is taken off. Many payrolls round to the nearest 15 minutes; six minutes is the one that makes each shift a neat tenth of an hour.

Hours and minutes, or decimals?

Both are shown, because they are used for different things.

7:30 is seven hours and thirty minutes — how you would say it. 7.50 is the same length written as a decimal, and that is what payroll systems and spreadsheets want. Seven hours thirty is not 7.30; it is 7.50, and mixing the two up is one of the most common ways a timesheet ends up wrong.

Working out your pay

Hours are only half of it. What most people actually want to know is what the week is worth, and that is the sum the calculator finishes with.

The arithmetic is:

• Normal pay = normal hours × your hourly rate
• Overtime pay = overtime hours × your hourly rate × the overtime multiplier
• Gross pay = the two added together

A worked example. You are on £12.50 an hour, overtime starts after 40 hours in the week, and overtime is time and a half:

• You work 46 hours, so 40 are normal and 6 are overtime
• Normal: 40 × £12.50 = £500.00
• Overtime: 6 × £12.50 × 1.5 = 6 × £18.75 = £112.50
• Gross pay = £612.50

Put the rate in the box, set the threshold and the multiplier to match your contract, and the calculator does exactly that. Type any currency symbol you like into the small box beside the rate — £, $, €, ₹, R, kr — it is only a label.

What overtime rates mean

• Time and a half (1.5×) — the most common. £12.50 an hour becomes £18.75 for those hours.
• Double time (2×) — often Sundays, public holidays or unsocial hours. £12.50 becomes £25.00.
• 1.25× — used in some agreements for the first few overtime hours.
• Same as normal (1×) — some salaried and some flat-rate jobs. Set this if extra hours are simply paid at your usual rate.

Whether overtime is counted weekly (past 40 hours in the week) or daily (past 8 in a day) changes what you are owed, and it differs by country and by contract — daily overtime is common in California and in a lot of shift work, weekly almost everywhere else. Pick the one your employer uses.

Turning an hourly rate into a weekly, monthly or yearly figure

Once you know the rate, the rest is multiplication:

• A week = hourly rate × hours a week
• A year = hourly rate × hours a week × 52
• A month = the yearly figure ÷ 12

So $15 an hour on a 40-hour week is $600 a week, $31,200 a year, and about $2,600 a month. $20 an hour is $800 a week and $41,600 a year. $25 is $1,000 a week and $52,000 a year.

The quick trick for a 40-hour week: double your hourly rate and add three zeros. $18 an hour is roughly $36,000 a year. It is close enough to sanity-check a job advert in your head.

Gross pay is not take-home pay

The figure here is gross — what you earned before anything comes out of it. Your actual payment will be lower once your employer deducts income tax, national insurance or social security, a pension contribution, student loan repayments and anything else your country or contract requires.

How much smaller depends entirely on where you live and your personal circumstances, so no calculator can tell you that from your hours alone. Use this to check that your hours and your gross pay are right on your payslip — which is the part employers actually get wrong.

Minutes to decimal hours

Payroll wants decimals, clocks give minutes. This is the conversion, and it is the single most common thing people get wrong on a timesheet:

• 5 minutes = 0.08 hours
• 6 minutes = 0.1 hours
• 10 minutes = 0.17 hours
• 12 minutes = 0.2 hours
• 15 minutes = 0.25 hours
• 20 minutes = 0.33 hours
• 30 minutes = 0.5 hours
• 40 minutes = 0.67 hours
• 45 minutes = 0.75 hours
• 50 minutes = 0.83 hours

The rule is simply minutes ÷ 60. So 7 hours 20 minutes is 7 + 20/60 = 7.33 hours, not 7.20. The calculator shows you both, so you never have to do this by hand.

Common questions

How many hours is 9 to 5? Eight hours, or 7.5 once you take off a 30-minute lunch. That is where the "37.5-hour week" comes from.

How many hours is 9 to 5:30 with a 30-minute lunch? 8 hours — 8.5 hours between the two times, less half an hour.

How many hours is 7am to 3:30pm? 8.5 hours, or 8 with a 30-minute break.

How do I work out hours from a night shift? Type the times as they are. A 22:00 start and an 02:00 finish is read as four hours, because a finish earlier than the start means the next morning.

How many working hours are in a month? About 173 on a 40-hour week (40 × 52 ÷ 12). A month with 21 working days is 168 hours; one with 23 is 184.

How many working hours are in a year? 2,080 on a 40-hour week before any holiday, and roughly 1,880 once you take off four weeks of leave and public holidays.

Is my lunch break paid? Usually not, which is why breaks come off the total here. If yours is paid, put 0 in the break box.

What is time and a half? Your normal rate multiplied by 1.5, paid on hours past the overtime threshold. Set the threshold and the multiplier at the top of the calculator.

Features

• A row for every day of the week, and extra rows for split shifts or a second job
• Tab accepts the suggested time, so a week of identical shifts takes seconds
• Any time format typed in, tidied up for you
• Night shifts across midnight handled correctly
• Breaks in minutes deducted per day
• Weekly or daily overtime, at a rate you choose
• Rounding to 5, 6, 15 or 30 minutes, or exact minutes
• Gross pay in any currency symbol you type
• Totals in both hours:minutes and decimal hours
• Copy the summary, download a CSV for your spreadsheet, or download a PDF timesheet you can hand in
• Your week is saved in this browser, so it survives closing the tab — and it never leaves your device

Who uses it

• Hourly workers checking a pay slip against what they actually worked
• Freelancers and contractors totting up billable hours before invoicing
• Small business owners running payroll for a handful of staff
• Shift workers with nights and split shifts, where the sums are fiddliest
• Students and part-timers working out what a week is worth

Related tools

• Time Duration Calculator — the hours between any two times or dates
• Business Days Calculator — working days between two dates
• Invoice Generator — turn those hours into an invoice
• Date Calculator — add or subtract days from a date
• Timer & Stopwatch — time a task as you do it

Good to know

• The pay figure is gross — before tax, insurance and anything else your employer deducts. It is a check on your hours, not a pay slip.
• If you set weekly overtime, the per-day pay column shows plain pay: overtime belongs to the week as a whole, not to any single day. With daily overtime the per-day figures include it.
• Download PDF gives you a proper one-page timesheet: the settings it was worked out under, every row as you typed it, the totals, and the date and page it came from. The text in it is real text, so it can be searched and copied — it is not a screenshot.

How to use it

• Type your start and finish time for the first day you worked
• Press Tab through the other days to accept the same shift, or type different times over it
• Put your break in minutes in the break box — 30 for a half-hour lunch
• Set the pay per hour and the currency symbol — this is what turns the hours into money
• Choose when overtime starts and what it is paid at
• Pick a rounding rule if your employer uses one
• Use Copy the first day to the rest when every day is the same
• Read the totals at the bottom, then copy them, download the CSV for a spreadsheet, or download the PDF to hand in