Time Card Calculator
Seven days, the breaks, and the rate
Your result will appear here
Fill in the fields on the left and this updates as you type.
Know what this estimate is based on
- Jurisdiction
- General mathematical model
- Scope and limitations
- Planning indicator only. It does not assess every part of a household's finances or replace individualized professional advice.
- Source links checked
- Jul 30, 2026
Built and regression-tested by Smart Tools Lab. It has not been individually reviewed by a licensed financial, tax, or legal professional.
How to use
- 01
Enter your hourly rate, then the hours you clocked on each of the seven days. Hours go in as decimals at a quarter-hour step, which is how a rounded card is kept anyway: 8 hours 15 minutes is 8.25, and 8 hours 40 minutes rounds to 8.75.
- 02
Enter the unpaid break minutes taken on each day you worked. The page applies them only to days that have hours on them, so a day off is not charged a lunch break.
- 03
Open Advanced and enter the minutes a day your employer's clock rounding takes off the card — leave it at zero if the clock rounds both ways. Add the hours you worked in the OTHER week of the same biweekly period, and the weeks a year you work.
- 04
Check the overtime threshold and multiplier. They carry the FLSA 40 and 1.5, and they are editable because several states pay daily overtime or double time the federal rule does not.
- 05
Read the paid hours and the gross, then the day-by-day table with its running total — the running column is where you can see exactly which day crossed the 40-hour line.
Formula
Paid hours for a day = clocked hours − unpaid break − rounding loss, floored at zero, and applied only to days that carry hours. Week hours = the seven daily figures added up. Straight-time hours = the lesser of week hours and the threshold. Overtime hours = week hours − threshold, floored at zero. Gross = straight-time hours × rate + overtime hours × rate × multiplier. Rounding cost = rounding hours × days worked × the MARGINAL rate — the overtime rate once the week is already past the threshold, the straight rate otherwise — then multiplied by the weeks a year you work. Biweekly check: correct overtime = this week's overtime + the other week's overtime. Averaged overtime = (this week + other week) ÷ 2 − threshold, floored at zero, times two. The loss is the difference in hours × rate × (multiplier − 1).
Example
$21.00 an hour with 8.5, 8.25, 8, 9, 8.75 and 4 hours clocked Monday to Saturday and nothing on Sunday — 46.50 clocked hours across six days. The break deduction takes 2.40 hours off across the week, leaving 44.10 paid hours. Forty of those are straight time at $21.00, which is $840, and 4.10 cross the line at $31.50, which is $129. Gross for the week is $969, and the effective rate across every paid hour is $21.98 rather than $21.00, because the overtime hours lift it. Fifty weeks like this is $48,458 before any tax. The break time alone is worth $50 at your rate — time you were at work and were not paid for, which is only lawful if you were genuinely relieved of duty for all of it. The running-total column shows Friday closing at 40.50 hours, so the overtime line was crossed on Friday afternoon and every Saturday hour was paid at $31.50.
Definitions
- Clocked hours
- Everything between the in punch and the out punch, before any break or rounding is taken off. The starting figure for the card, and the one to compare against your own record.
- Bona fide meal period
- A break of 30 minutes or more during which you are completely relieved of duty. Only this may be unpaid. Being available, on call at the desk, or unable to leave the floor makes it work time.
- Rest period
- A short break of roughly 20 minutes or less. Compensable time under 29 C.F.R. 785.18 and counted as hours worked, whatever a handbook says.
- Quarter-hour rounding
- The practice permitted by 29 C.F.R. 785.48(b) of rounding punches to the nearest quarter hour — 1 to 7 minutes down, 8 to 14 up — lawful only where it averages out over time.
- De minimis time
- Seconds or a few minutes that are administratively impractical to record. The narrow exception to counting every minute worked, and courts have been narrowing it further.
- Off-the-clock work
- Compensable time performed outside the punch — booting a terminal, donning required gear, closing a till, driving between sites during the day, answering messages at home.
Good to know
A card is hours worked, and those start before the punch
The purpose of a time card is to record every hour worked, and the punch clock is only an approximation of that. Compensable time begins when you start performing work that is integral and indispensable to your principal job, which is frequently before the clock sees you. Booting a terminal and waiting for it to load, donning required protective gear, setting up a station or a till, walking a required security line after gearing up, closing out a register after the punch, driving between job sites during the working day, and answering work messages from home in the evening are all hours worked. So is time an employer suffers or permits you to work even without asking for it: if a supervisor knows you are answering the phone during your lunch and says nothing, that is work. The narrow exception the law recognises is de minimis time — seconds or a very few minutes that are administratively impractical to record — and courts have been steadily narrowing even that, particularly where modern systems can capture the time precisely. The practical consequence for the seven fields on this page is that you should enter the hours you actually worked, not the hours the badge reader captured, and then compare the two. Where they differ, the card is what needs correcting, and it is much easier to correct in the week it happened than a year later. One boundary worth knowing so you do not overstate: the ordinary commute from home to your regular workplace is not compensable, even when it is long. Travel BETWEEN work sites during the day is. Travel that keeps you away from home overnight has its own set of rules that turn on whether the travel falls within your normal working hours.
Which breaks come off, and which never can
The break field on this page removes time from the card, so it deserves more scrutiny than any other input. Federal law draws a bright line at roughly twenty minutes. Rest periods of about that length or less are compensable under 29 C.F.R. 785.18 and must be counted as hours worked — a coffee break, a smoke break, a stretch away from the line — because short breaks are understood to benefit the employer through better productivity. No handbook may make them unpaid. A meal period of thirty minutes or more may be unpaid, but only where it is bona fide, and bona fide has a specific meaning: you must be COMPLETELY RELIEVED OF DUTY. That is a high bar and a great many workplaces fail it without realising. Eating at your desk while covering the phone is work. A nurse who must remain on the floor is working. A retail worker who must stay in the store to keep it staffed is working. A driver waiting with a load is often working. Being interrupted once during lunch does not automatically destroy the deduction, but a lunch that is routinely interrupted is not bona fide and the whole period is payable. The mechanism that produces most of these claims is the automatic deduction: a payroll system removes a fixed lunch every day whether or not one was taken, and does so silently. Such a system is lawful only where the employer has a genuine way for you to report a missed or interrupted break and honours it. The way to protect yourself is unglamorous and effective — note the days you worked through, report them in writing at the time, and keep the reply. In the default week on this page the deduction removes 2.40 hours, worth $50 at a $21.00 rate. If you were on duty for any of it, that is $50 of unpaid work in one week and roughly $2,500 across a year of them.
Rounding, grace periods and the seven-minute rule
Rounding is lawful and asymmetric rounding is not, and the difference is worth real money. 29 C.F.R. 785.48(b) permits an employer to round punches to the nearest quarter hour: minutes 1 through 7 round down, minutes 8 through 14 round up. The rule exists as an administrative convenience from an era of paper cards, and it survives on one condition — that the practice averages out over time so employees are fully compensated for all the time they actually work. That condition is where systems fail. A clock configured to round a 7:53 arrival forward to 8:00 while rounding a 4:07 departure back to 4:00 has taken thirteen minutes and returned nothing. Each instance looks trivial; six days a week at ten minutes a day is an hour a week, and at an overtime rate of $31.50 that is roughly $1,600 a year on a modest wage. That is exactly what the advanced rounding field on this page prices, and it prices it at the MARGINAL rate rather than the straight one, because a card already past 40 hours loses the rounded minutes from the overtime portion. Grace periods are the same rule wearing a different name: a policy that lets you clock in five minutes early without penalty but does not pay those five minutes is one-way rounding, and if you actually worked them they are payable. The way to test your own employer is not to argue about policy but to collect data. Note your real arrival and departure to the minute for a fortnight and compare the total against the card. If the difference runs consistently in one direction, that is the violation; if it wanders either way and roughly cancels, the rounding is doing what the regulation contemplates and there is nothing to claim.
The workweek is the unit, and the card is not the last word
Two things decide whether the gross on this page is the right gross. The first is the unit of measurement. Overtime is computed on the workweek — a fixed, recurring 168-hour period the employer sets — and never on the pay period. Hours are therefore never averaged across the two weeks of a biweekly period: fifty hours one week and thirty the next owes ten hours of overtime, even though the average is exactly 40 and the total is exactly 80. It is a common payroll error rather than a hypothetical one, which is why the other week of the period is a field here and the two answers are shown side by side. The employer may choose which day its workweek begins and may change it, but not for the purpose of evading overtime. Note also that the FLSA contains no daily overtime, no double time and no weekend or holiday premium at all; a twelve-hour day owes nothing extra federally, though California, Colorado and Nevada each pay daily overtime on their own terms. The second thing is the rate. This page multiplies the hourly rate you entered by 1.5 for overtime hours, which is correct only where that rate is your entire compensation for the week. Add a promised attendance or production bonus, a shift differential or any commission and the overtime hours are owed on the FLSA regular rate — a higher figure that folds those in before the multiplier — and the overtime page here takes the hours this one produces and does that arithmetic. Finally, records. Under 29 C.F.R. 516 the employer must keep accurate records of hours worked, two years for time cards and three for payroll. Where it has not, Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery (1946) shifts the burden: an employee may prove a claim on a reasonable estimate, and the employer must produce evidence to negate it. Your own photograph of the card each week is what makes an estimate reasonable.
Frequently asked questions
How do I convert hours and minutes into the decimals this page wants?
Divide the minutes by 60: 15 minutes is 0.25, 30 is 0.5, 45 is 0.75. So 8 hours 15 minutes is 8.25 and 8 hours 30 minutes is 8.5. If your employer rounds punches to the nearest quarter hour, the card already holds quarter-hour figures and there is nothing to convert — 8 hours 40 minutes lands on 8.75, because 8:40 is nearer 8:45 than 8:30.
Can my employer deduct a lunch break I did not really take?
No. A meal period may be unpaid only where it is a bona fide one of 30 minutes or more AND you are completely relieved of duty. Eating at your desk while answering the phone is work. A nurse who cannot leave the floor, a line worker covering a machine, a driver waiting with a load — all of them are working, and an automatic deduction taken anyway is unpaid time. The deduction on this page is the one you enter; if you worked through any of it, those minutes are payable.
Are my short breaks paid?
Yes. Rest periods of about 20 minutes or less are compensable time under 29 C.F.R. 785.18 and must be counted as hours worked, whatever the handbook says. A coffee break, a smoke break and a stretch break are all paid. Only a bona fide meal period of 30 minutes or more, free of all duties, may be unpaid — which is why the break field on this page is a single figure per day rather than a total of every pause.
Is it legal for my employer to round my punches?
It can be. 29 C.F.R. 785.48(b) permits rounding to the nearest quarter hour — minutes 1 through 7 down, 8 through 14 up — but only where the practice averages out over time so employees are fully compensated for all the time actually worked. A clock that rounds a 7:53 arrival to 8:00 and a 4:07 departure to 4:00 is rounding one way only, and that is unlawful however small each instance looks. Grace periods are the same rule under another name. Put the minutes a day it takes into the advanced field and the page prices them across the year.
My payroll averages the two weeks of my biweekly period. Is that allowed?
No. The workweek is the unit, full stop — hours are never averaged across the two weeks of a biweekly pay period. Fifty hours one week and thirty the next owes ten hours of overtime, not none, even though the average is exactly 40 and the total is exactly 80. Enter the other week's hours in the advanced panel and the page prices the difference between the correct answer and the averaged one.
I worked a twelve-hour day. Do I get overtime for it?
Not under federal law. The FLSA has no daily overtime, no double time and no weekend or holiday premium — it counts hours worked over 40 in the workweek and nothing else. Several states do pay daily overtime: California past 8 hours and double time past 12, Colorado past 12, Nevada past 8 for anyone earning under one and a half times the minimum wage. That is why the threshold on this page is a field.
What if my employer keeps no records, or the records are wrong?
Keeping accurate records of hours worked is the employer's duty under 29 C.F.R. 516 — time cards for at least two years, payroll records for three. Where the employer has failed, the burden shifts: under Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery (1946) an employee may carry a claim on a reasonable estimate of the hours worked, and the employer must produce evidence to negate it. Your own copy is what makes that estimate reasonable. Photograph the card weekly.
Is the gross on this page what my overtime is really worth?
Only if your hourly rate is your whole compensation for the week. This page prices overtime at 1.5 times the rate you entered. If you also received a promised attendance or production bonus, a shift differential for nights or weekends, or any commission, the overtime hours are owed on the FLSA regular rate instead — a higher number that folds those in before the multiplier. The overtime page here does that arithmetic and takes the hours figure from this one.