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Guides

Seven practical guides on hours, breaks, overtime and timesheets

A calculator hands you a number. It does not tell you whether the number is the right one to put on a timesheet, whether the half hour your employer deducted should have been deducted, or why payroll turned your 7 hours 20 minutes into 7.33. These seven guides cover that part. Each one works through real figures you can check by hand, and each links to the calculator that does the same arithmetic for you.

Start here if you are checking your own hours

Work through them in this order. How to calculate hours worked is the foundation: converting clock times to a 24-hour reading or to minutes since midnight, subtracting, taking off the unpaid break, and only then converting to decimal hours. Convert minutes to decimal hours deals with the single most common arithmetic error on a timesheet — writing 7.45 where 7.75 belongs — and carries the full minute-by-minute conversion table. How to fill out a timesheet then puts both into a week you can submit.

The three places hours quietly go missing

Most pay disputes are not fraud. They are three mechanical things nobody explained. Lunch breaks: paid or unpaid? covers the break that was deducted automatically on a day you ate at your desk. Time card rounding rules covers the seven minutes that disappear at each end of a shift, and how to tell neutral rounding from rounding that only ever goes one way. Calculating hours for overnight shifts covers the night shift that subtraction turns into a negative number, and which calendar day it belongs to when the weekly total is worked out.

Where overtime actually comes from

Overtime causes more confusion than any other line on a payslip, partly because the federal rule and the state rules answer different questions. Overtime rules explained sets out the basics in plain English: what a workweek is, why the federal threshold is 40 hours in that week rather than 8 hours in a day, why some states add a daily rule on top, and why hours already paid as daily overtime are not counted a second time toward the weekly figure. The overtime calculator applies exactly that split, with both thresholds editable so you can match your own employer's policy.

How these guides are written

Every figure in every example was computed with the same tested functions that run the calculators, so the worked examples and the tools agree to the minute. Where a rule varies by state, by country or by employer policy, the guide says so rather than guessing — these pages are general information about arithmetic and common practice, not legal or payroll advice. Each guide carries the date it was last reviewed, and corrections are welcome. More on the method behind the numbers is on how this calculator works and about us.

Common conventions these guides assume

Unless a guide says otherwise, the worked examples use the conventions most readers of this site will recognise. Clock times are written on a 12-hour clock with AM and PM, because that is what United States time clocks print; every calculator on the site also accepts and displays a 24-hour clock if you prefer it, and the toggle sits next to the inputs. Hours are reported twice, once as hours and minutes and once as decimal hours to two places, because timesheets are filled in the first format and payroll systems are fed the second. A week runs Monday to Sunday in the examples, which is only a presentation choice: an employer is free to define its workweek as starting on any day, and that definition is what the weekly overtime threshold is measured against.

Breaks are treated as unpaid minutes subtracted from the shift, which is the common arrangement for a genuine uninterrupted meal period, and the guides are explicit about the cases where a break should not have been deducted at all. Overtime examples use the federal default of one and a half times the regular rate after 40 hours in a workweek, with daily thresholds shown separately because they come from state law rather than federal law. Nothing here is specific to one employer's policy, one state or one country, so read the rule and then check it against your own contract, handbook or labour authority before relying on it.

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