A 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM day with a 30-minute unpaid break is 7.5 hours worked, which payroll systems read as 7.50 decimal hours.
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Almost every timesheet error traces back to one habit: treating minutes like cents. Someone works from 9:00 to 5:15, sees "15 minutes," and types 8.15 into a spreadsheet instead of 8.25. It looks close enough to be invisible and wrong enough to shortchange every paycheck it touches.
Turn both clock times into minutes since midnight first. A 9:00 AM start is 540 minutes. A 5:00 PM finish is 1,020 minutes. Subtract for 480 minutes gross. Pull out a 30-minute unpaid break and you have 450 minutes left, which is 7.5 hours, or 7 hours and 30 minutes if you'd rather read it that way. Working in minutes the whole time is what keeps the clock from lying to you.
| Minutes | Decimal hours | Hours and minutes |
|---|---|---|
| 450 | 7.50 | 7h 30m |
| 465 | 7.75 | 7h 45m |
| 500 | 8.33 | 8h 20m |
| 510 | 8.50 | 8h 30m |
Start at 10:00 PM, finish at 6:00 AM, and a plain subtraction gives you a negative number, because 6:00 AM looks earlier than 10:00 PM on the clock. The calculator adds 24 hours to the end time whenever this happens, which turns the math into 480 minutes, or 8 hours, before the break comes out. You never have to notice or fix this yourself; it happens automatically the moment the end time reads earlier than the start.
Payroll multiplies decimal hours by a rate, which is the whole reason decimal hours exist. A 7.5-hour shift at $16 an hour is 7.5 times $16, or $120 gross, before taxes and anything else withholding takes out. Enter a rate above to see your own figure. What this tool will not do is separate out overtime, because overtime only makes sense measured across a full workweek, not a single shift; the hours or time card calculator handles that comparison.
Rounded punches. If your employer rounds clock-ins and clock-outs to the nearest quarter hour, the number this tool gives you from your actual times may not match your pay stub exactly. The Department of Labor allows that kind of rounding under the FLSA, as long as it is applied evenly and does not consistently work against employees over time. If yours seems to always round down, that is worth raising with payroll.
If you came here for a single number, it is probably in this table. Every row assumes the break listed is unpaid.
| Start | End | Break | Hours worked |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9:00 AM | 5:00 PM | 60 min | 7.00 |
| 9:00 AM | 5:00 PM | 30 min | 7.50 |
| 8:00 AM | 4:30 PM | 30 min | 8.00 |
| 8:30 AM | 5:00 PM | 60 min | 7.50 |
| 7:00 AM | 3:30 PM | 30 min | 8.00 |
| 7:00 AM | 7:00 PM | 60 min | 11.00 |
| 3:00 PM | 11:00 PM | 30 min | 7.50 |
| 11:00 PM | 7:00 AM | 30 min | 7.50 |
Only the unpaid ones, and federal rules are pickier about that than most people expect. Under the FLSA, short rest breaks of roughly 5 to 20 minutes count as paid working time; they stay in your total and never touch the break field. A meal period of 30 minutes or longer can be unpaid, but only when you are completely relieved of duty for it. Eat at your desk while covering the phones and that half hour is work time, not a break. So a day with two paid 15-minute breaks and one unpaid 30-minute lunch gets 30 in the break field, not 60. Worth knowing too: the FLSA does not require employers to offer breaks at all. Some states do, with their own paid-or-unpaid rules layered on top, which is why the same shift can total differently across a state line.
A server working 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM and again from 5:00 PM to 9:00 PM has two ways to use this page. Run the calculator twice and add the results: 3.00 plus 4.00 makes 7 hours. Or run it once, 11:00 AM to 9:00 PM, with the 180-minute afternoon gap entered as the break, which lands on the same 7.00. Both are correct. The two-pass method is the safer habit when the evening span crosses midnight, because mixing an overnight wrap with a long midday gap is exactly where hand-checking starts to wobble.
Three symptoms cover nearly every bad result this tool ever shows, and all three are input problems.
Before trusting any result, estimate the gross span in your head: end hour minus start hour, ignore the minutes. A punch pair of 8:57 AM and 5:04 PM is roughly 9 to 5, call it 8 hours, so after a 30-minute lunch the answer should land near 7.5. The calculator says 7.62, which fits; the exact span was 8 hours 7 minutes, and 7 hours 37 minutes remained after the break. Had the tool shown 4.62 or 11.62 instead, the estimate would have flagged it instantly, and the culprit would be a mistyped hour rather than anything in the math. An estimate cannot do payroll, but it is very good at catching the answers that could not possibly be right.
An overnight total from this calculator stands on its own, but for overtime the hours can split across two workweeks. The FLSA measures overtime against a fixed, recurring 168-hour workweek that your employer defines, and it does not have to match the calendar week. A 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM shift that straddles the boundary contributes some hours to one week's count toward 40 and the rest to the next week's. The shift total never changes. Where it counts does, and for anyone working nights near the overtime line, that boundary is worth asking payroll about by name.
Sources: DOL Fact Sheet 22, Hours Worked under the FLSA, U.S. Department of Labor, Overtime Pay.
Reading minutes as if they were cents. 8:15 gets typed as 8.15 hours when it is actually 8.25. The fix is always the same: divide the minutes by 60 before you do anything else with the number.
Because that is how most people remember a lunch break, as 30 or 45 minutes, not as 0.5 or 0.75 of an hour. The tool does the minutes-to-decimal conversion for you internally.
Yes. Whenever the end time reads earlier than the start time, the calculator assumes the shift crossed midnight and adds 24 hours before subtracting, so the total comes out correct without any extra input from you.
No. This tool works from the exact times you enter. If your employer rounds punches to the nearest quarter hour, your pay stub may differ slightly from this result; the FLSA permits that kind of rounding as long as it does not consistently shortchange workers.
No, it totals one span of time only. Overtime is a weekly calculation, so add up several shifts with the hours calculator or time card calculator to see whether you crossed 40 hours.
No. An unpaid meal period only exists when you are fully relieved of duty for it. If you worked through lunch, enter 0 break minutes; under the FLSA that time counts as hours worked.
Not under federal rules. Short breaks of about 5 to 20 minutes are paid working time, so leave them out of the break field. Only a bona fide unpaid meal period gets subtracted.
Run each span separately and add the totals, or run one span from first start to last end with the midday gap entered as break minutes. Both give the same answer for spans within one day.
The end time was set to AM instead of PM. The calculator treats an end time earlier than the start as a shift crossing midnight and adds 24 hours. Correct the AM/PM setting and the total fixes itself.