Timecard calculator with breaks and overtime

What is a timecard?

A timecard is the record of when someone started work, when they stopped, and what came off in between. One row per day, a clock-in, a clock-out, any unpaid break, and a total. Add the seven days together and you have the week that payroll gets paid from and that an hourly invoice is built out of.

It has one job: to be the agreed record of hours. That is why the arithmetic matters more than it looks. A timecard that is five minutes out every day is a little over two hours a month, and it is always the same person who absorbs it.

What is time and a half?

Time and a half is an hourly rate multiplied by 1.5, paid on hours that qualify as overtime. At $20 an hour, time and a half is $30 an hour. The name is literal: you are paid the hour, plus half the hour again.

Under the US Fair Labor Standards Act, non-exempt employees are owed at least time and a half for every hour past 40 in a workweek. It is a weekly test, not a daily one — a twelve-hour Tuesday does not create overtime by itself if the week still lands under 40. Some states go further, some roles are exempt, and other countries work differently, so treat 40 and 1.5× as the default rather than the rule.

How do you calculate time and a half?

Three steps, and the first one is where the mistakes happen.

1. Total the week from the paid minutes — clock-out minus clock-in, minus unpaid breaks. Say it comes to 45 hours.
2. Split it at the threshold. The first 40 hours are regular, the remaining 5 are overtime.
3. Price each part. Regular: 40 × $20 = $800. Overtime: 5 × $30 = $150, because $20 × 1.5 is $30. Gross pay is $950.

The common error is multiplying the whole week by 1.5. Only the hours past the threshold earn the premium; the first 40 stay at the plain rate. The other one is rounding hours to the nearest quarter before the split, which quietly moves hours across the 40-hour line. Total the minutes first, split second, round last.

Do unpaid breaks come off the total?

An unpaid meal break does, and it is entered per day above so it comes off before anything else is worked out. Under federal rules a genuine meal break of about 30 minutes or more, where the person is actually relieved of duty, can be unpaid. Short rest breaks — roughly 5 to 20 minutes — are generally counted as paid time and should not be deducted at all.

The test is whether the person is free of the work, not whether they left the building. Eating at a desk while still answering the phone is not an unpaid break, and deducting it is the most common way a timecard ends up short.

Reading the result

The weekly total is given in hours and minutes and in decimal hours because the two are used in different places. Payroll and invoices want the decimal — 8 h 30 m is 8.5 hours, never 8.30. If you need that conversion on its own, the hours to decimal calculator does it in both directions, and the time duration calculator handles a single span — including one that runs past midnight.

Want a blank week to fill in instead? The timesheet templates are free CSV files with the columns already set up.

Where a timecard stops working

A timecard is only as good as the memory that fills it. Filled in at the end of the week, it is a reconstruction: the day gets rounded to the nearest half hour, the twenty minutes on a call before lunch is gone, and the evening spent fixing something is remembered as an hour when it was closer to two. The arithmetic on this page is exact. The inputs usually are not, and that is the part no calculator can fix.

If the week is being reconstructed from memory more often than not, the fix is to stop reconstructing it — an automatic time tracker records the start and end times as they happen, so the timecard is already filled when you go to check it.