Time card & payroll
To find hours worked, subtract the start time from the end time, then take off any unpaid break. Enter your shift below to get hours and minutes, decimal hours for payroll, total minutes, and an optional pay estimate. Overnight shifts are handled automatically.
Hours worked
8h 00m
Decimal hours (payroll)
8.00
net hours ÷ 1, rounded to 2dp
Total minutes
480
Gross (before break)
8h 30m
Break deducted
30 min
Working out hours from a clock-in and clock-out time sounds trivial until you actually do it by hand. The problem is that time is base-60, not base-10: the gap between 9:50 and 10:10 is twenty minutes, not sixty, and our usual decimal instincts get it wrong. The reliable method is to convert both times to minutes since midnight, subtract, then convert the result back. A 09:00 start is 540 minutes; a 17:30 finish is 1,050 minutes; the difference is 510 minutes, which is 8 hours and 30 minutes. Take off a 30-minute unpaid lunch and you are left with 8 hours of paid work. That is exactly the arithmetic this tool performs, so you never have to borrow across the hour boundary in your head.
Almost every payroll system multiplies hours by an hourly rate, and you cannot cleanly multiply "8 hours 30 minutes" by a dollar figure. That is why timesheets are converted to decimal hours, where the minutes become a fraction of an hour. Half an hour is 0.5, a quarter hour is 0.25, and ten minutes is 0.166..., which payroll usually rounds to two decimals (0.17). The tool shows both forms side by side: the human-readable "8h 30m" and the payroll-ready "8.50", so you can copy whichever one your timesheet asks for. If you add an hourly rate, it also multiplies the net decimal hours by that rate to give a quick gross-pay estimate before tax and deductions.
Night-shift and hospitality workers run into the classic trap where the finish time looks smaller than the start time: a shift from 22:00 to 06:00 naively reads as "negative sixteen hours." The fix is to recognise the shift crossed midnight and add 24 hours to the end, giving the correct 8 hours. This calculator detects that automatically whenever the end time is at or before the start time. Breaks matter too: most jurisdictions treat meal breaks as unpaid, so the minutes you enter in the break field are subtracted from the total before pay is worked out. Rounding is the last wrinkle. Some US employers use quarter-hour rounding under the so-called 7-minute rule, where anything in the first seven minutes of a quarter rounds down and the rest rounds up; the rounding must be neutral so it does not consistently favour the employer. This tool reports exact minutes and leaves the rounding policy to you, because the correct rule depends entirely on where you work and what your contract says.
Need to count whole days or business days instead of hours within a day? Use the days-between tool for the gap between two dates, or the working-days calculator to exclude weekends and public holidays. If your shift spans time zones, convert it first with the time zone converter.
Subtract the start time from the end time. For a 9:00 start and a 17:30 finish that is 8 hours 30 minutes. Then subtract any unpaid break: a 30-minute lunch leaves 8 hours of paid time. This tool does the subtraction for you and also handles shifts that cross midnight.
Decimal hours express minutes as a fraction of an hour instead of as minutes. 8 hours 30 minutes is 8.50 decimal hours because 30 minutes is half an hour. Payroll systems multiply decimal hours by an hourly rate, so 8.50 hours at $18.00 is exactly $153.00. The common conversions are 15 minutes = 0.25, 20 minutes = 0.33, 30 minutes = 0.50, and 45 minutes = 0.75.
If the end time is the same as or earlier than the start time, the tool assumes the shift ran past midnight and adds 24 hours to the end. A shift from 22:00 to 06:00 is correctly counted as 8 hours rather than a negative number.
Many US employers use the 7-minute rule (quarter-hour rounding): time is rounded to the nearest 15 minutes, and the rounding must be neutral so it does not systematically shortchange workers. This tool reports exact minutes; check your employer's policy or local labor rules before rounding a timesheet.