Timesheet Calculator

A timesheet follows the pay period, and the pay period decides how many days it holds and how overtime has to be worked out. The four schedules in common use in the United States:

Choose the period in the calculator with the From and To dates. Weekly and biweekly timesheets are easiest on the time card calculator, which starts on the workweek; this page is set to the period view, which takes any range up to 62 days, so a semi-monthly, monthly or odd-length period is entered as it is. Each day has a start, an end and an unpaid lunch, and a day type: work, vacation, sick, holiday or off. Vacation, sick and holiday days are credited with the daily target hours so the timesheet shows paid hours as well as worked hours. Federal holidays are filled in from the calendar when you pick the United States rule set.

The difficulty with a semi-monthly or monthly timesheet is that the Fair Labor Standards Act measures overtime by workweek, a fixed and recurring 168 hours (29 U.S.C. 207(a)(1)), while the period cuts through the middle of a week. The rule for which paycheck carries the overtime is in 29 CFR 778.106: overtime earned in a workweek is paid on the regular payday for the period in which that workweek ends. The straight-time hours of an unfinished week are paid in the current period; its overtime, if any, is paid with the next one once the week is complete.

An example with a Sunday-to-Saturday workweek. The period is October 1 to 15, 2026; October 1 is a Thursday. An employee works nine hours Monday to Friday. The workweek of September 27 to October 3 has 45 hours, so 5 of them are overtime, and because that week ends on October 3, inside the period, the overtime is paid now even though three of the nine-hour days were in September. The week of October 11 to 17 ends after the 15th: October 12 to 15 are paid as 36 straight-time hours on this timesheet, and the overtime for that week appears on the next one.

To make the calculator show this correctly, enter the period as the workweeks that end inside it, here September 27 to October 10, and read the overtime from the weekly subtotals. Then enter October 11 to 15 for the straight-time hours of the open week. Two short timesheets are more reliable than one that silently splits a week; the calculator groups days into workweeks from the week start of the chosen rule set, Sunday for the US rules, and a period that starts on a Thursday begins with a three-day partial week that cannot be judged for overtime on its own.

The year has 250 workdays after federal holidays, 2,000 hours at 8 hours a day. A salaried employee is paid the same amount every period regardless of these figures; an hourly employee's semi-monthly paycheck moves between the shortest period and the longest, a difference of two or three days' pay. Most private employers do not close for every federal holiday, so replace the holiday column with your own calendar; the day type Holiday in the calculator does exactly that. The monthly totals and the comparison with 173.33 hours are on the work hours in a month page.

A timesheet is read in hours and minutes and paid in decimal hours. The calculator shows both for every day and for the period: 7:45 and 7.75, 8:20 and 8.33. The conversion is minutes divided by 60, and the minute chart is on the hours to decimal page.

Where timesheets go wrong is in the order of rounding. Converting each day to two decimals and then adding can differ from the true total by a few hundredths, because each day's rounding error is carried into the sum. Ten days of 8 hours 20 minutes are exactly 83 hours 20 minutes, which is 83.33 hours; adding ten daily values that were each rounded to 8.33 gives 83.30. The calculator adds minutes and converts once, at the end, which is also what payroll systems do. When you check a timesheet against a pay stub, compare the period total, not the daily figures.

Each day has a lunch field in minutes or, if the break varies, a lunch entered as a time range. A bona fide meal period of ordinarily 30 minutes or more during which the employee is completely relieved of duty is not hours worked under 29 CFR 785.19, and that is what the field is for. Rest breaks of 5 to 20 minutes are hours worked under 29 CFR 785.18 and are not entered. A timesheet that shows a 30-minute lunch on a day the employee ate at the desk while covering the phone is wrong, and the employer, not the employee, is responsible for the accuracy of the record under 29 CFR 516.2.

Automatic lunch deductions are the most common source of a shortfall on a semi-monthly stub: 30 minutes a day over 11 workdays is 5.5 hours. If your employer deducts automatically, enter your real lunch on the timesheet and compare.

The Download Excel button writes a .xlsx workbook with one row per day: date, day type, start, end, breaks, hours in hh:mm, decimal hours and target hours, with a total row at the bottom, in real time and number cells so you can keep calculating in the sheet. The CSV export has the same columns for any other program, and Print / PDF produces a timesheet page with name, period, totals and signature lines for employee and employer.

Profiles keep separate timesheets for several people or several projects in the same browser: one profile per employee for a small team, or one per client for a freelancer who bills by the hour. Each profile has its own period, days and settings. Nothing is uploaded; the entries live in your browser's storage and the exported files are created locally. Blank weekly and monthly spreadsheets with formulas, for people who prefer to fill in Excel directly, are on the timesheet template page.

For a non-exempt employee, payroll needs the hours worked each workday and the total each workweek, the regular and overtime hours, the rate and the resulting straight-time and overtime earnings. That list is the recordkeeping requirement of 29 CFR 516.2, summarised in Department of Labor Fact Sheet #21, and it is why the timesheet separates regular hours from overtime instead of showing one total. Enter the hourly rate under Pay, overtime, rounding and the period result shows regular pay, overtime pay and the gross amount.

Records of hours must be kept for 2 years and payroll records for 3 years; the timesheet retention guide lists the state rules that go further. Exempt salaried employees have no hours requirement under the FLSA, but a timesheet is still the basis for PTO accruals and project billing, and the calculator works the same way with the overtime rule set to None.