The time desk
Free Online Hours to Decimal Calculator
Payroll runs on decimal hours, clocks run on minutes. Convert h:mm to decimal hours and back instantly, and use the full minutes table below as a reference.
Minutes to decimal hours: full table
Every whole minute from 1 to 60, rounded to two decimals — the rounding payroll systems use. Print this page to keep it next to your time clock.
| Minutes | Decimal |
|---|---|
| 1 min | 0.02 |
| 2 min | 0.03 |
| 3 min | 0.05 |
| 4 min | 0.07 |
| 5 min | 0.08 |
| 6 min | 0.10 |
| 7 min | 0.12 |
| 8 min | 0.13 |
| 9 min | 0.15 |
| 10 min | 0.17 |
| 11 min | 0.18 |
| 12 min | 0.20 |
| 13 min | 0.22 |
| 14 min | 0.23 |
| 15 min | 0.25 |
| 16 min | 0.27 |
| 17 min | 0.28 |
| 18 min | 0.30 |
| 19 min | 0.32 |
| 20 min | 0.33 |
| 21 min | 0.35 |
| 22 min | 0.37 |
| 23 min | 0.38 |
| 24 min | 0.40 |
| 25 min | 0.42 |
| 26 min | 0.43 |
| 27 min | 0.45 |
| 28 min | 0.47 |
| 29 min | 0.48 |
| 30 min | 0.50 |
| 31 min | 0.52 |
| 32 min | 0.53 |
| 33 min | 0.55 |
| 34 min | 0.57 |
| 35 min | 0.58 |
| 36 min | 0.60 |
| 37 min | 0.62 |
| 38 min | 0.63 |
| 39 min | 0.65 |
| 40 min | 0.67 |
| 41 min | 0.68 |
| 42 min | 0.70 |
| 43 min | 0.72 |
| 44 min | 0.73 |
| 45 min | 0.75 |
| 46 min | 0.77 |
| 47 min | 0.78 |
| 48 min | 0.80 |
| 49 min | 0.82 |
| 50 min | 0.83 |
| 51 min | 0.85 |
| 52 min | 0.87 |
| 53 min | 0.88 |
| 54 min | 0.90 |
| 55 min | 0.92 |
| 56 min | 0.93 |
| 57 min | 0.95 |
| 58 min | 0.97 |
| 59 min | 0.98 |
| 60 min | 1.00 |
Two number systems
Why payroll insists on 7.75 instead of 7:45
A clock counts in sixtieths. Money counts in hundredths. Those two systems meet on every timesheet, and the hours to decimal calculator above exists because the meeting point is where mistakes get made — a worker reads 7 hours 45 minutes off a time clock, a payroll field wants a number it can multiply by an hourly rate, and 7.45 is not that number.
The conversion itself is a single division:
Minutes become a fraction of an hour:
decimal hours = hours + (minutes ÷ 60)
So 7 hours 45 minutes = 7 + (45 ÷ 60) = 7 + 0.75 = 7.75
Going the other way, you multiply the fractional part back up:
minutes = (decimal hours − whole hours) × 60
So 6.4 h → 0.4 × 60 = 24 min → 6:24
The box above runs both directions at once. Type into the h:mm field and the decimal field follows; type a decimal and the h:mm field follows. There is no convert button to press, because the two representations are the same quantity wearing different clothes.
The eight-minute trap
The reason this conversion deserves its own tool is that the wrong version looks almost right. Write 7:20 as 7.20 and you have claimed 7 hours 12 minutes instead of 7 hours 20 minutes — an 8-minute error that is far too small to notice on one line and large enough to matter across a payroll. The gap is widest in the middle of the hour and closes at both ends, which is exactly the pattern that lets it survive a spot check: :15 and :45 look wrong immediately, :20 and :35 do not.
Memorise these
The values worth knowing by heart
You do not need all sixty rows in your head. Quarter hours and five-minute steps cover the overwhelming majority of real punches, because most schedules, breaks and rounding rules land on them.
| Minutes | Decimal | Also written as |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | 0.08 | one twelfth of an hour |
| 10 | 0.17 | one sixth |
| 15 | 0.25 | quarter hour |
| 20 | 0.33 | one third |
| 25 | 0.42 | — |
| 30 | 0.50 | half hour |
| 35 | 0.58 | — |
| 40 | 0.67 | two thirds |
| 45 | 0.75 | three quarter hour |
| 50 | 0.83 | five sixths |
| 55 | 0.92 | — |
| 60 | 1.00 | one hour |
Four of those are worth genuine memorisation because they carry most of the traffic on a time card: 0.25, 0.50, 0.75 and 1.00. If your employer rounds punches to the nearest quarter hour, every total you ever see will be built out of those four numbers and nothing else.
Reading the full minutes table above
The complete 1-to-60 table sits directly under the converter at the top of this page, generated rather than typed so it cannot contain a transcription error. Use the short table here for recall, and the long one when you need an exact value for an odd minute like 37 or 52.
Worked examples
Three conversions in context
1. A single shift: 7:38 AM to 4:07 PM, 30-minute unpaid lunch
Elapsed: 16:07 − 07:38 = 509 minutes. Less the break: 509 − 30 = 479 minutes.
479 ÷ 60 = 7 h 59 min → 7 + (59 ÷ 60) = 7.98 h
At $21.40 an hour that is 7.98 × 21.40 = $170.77. Had the same figure been entered as 7.59 by someone copying the h:mm form straight across, the line would read $162.43 — $8.34 short on one day, and over a 250-day year, more than two thousand dollars. The elapsed step is handled for you by the time card calculator, which deducts the break before converting.
2. A week of odd minutes added up
Mon 8:12, Tue 7:49, Wed 8:31, Thu 8:03, Fri 6:55
492 + 469 + 511 + 483 + 415 = 2,370 min → 39 h 30 min → 39.50 h
Note the order of operations: every day was converted to minutes, the minutes were summed, and only the final total was turned into a decimal. Convert each day to a two-decimal figure first and you round five times instead of once — 8.20 + 8.17 + 8.52 + 8.05 + 6.92 = 39.86, which is wrong by over twenty minutes. Always sum in minutes, then convert. The timesheet calculator does it in that order.
3. Decimal back to minutes for a client invoice
Your tracker reports 3.4 hours on a task. What do you write on the timesheet?
0.4 × 60 = 24 min → 3:24, not 3:40
Billing software and project trackers almost always emit decimals, so this is the direction freelancers need most. 3.4 and 3:40 differ by 16 minutes, and the mistake tends to run in the client's favour or yours consistently, which is how it gets noticed eventually.
Rounding
What two decimal places actually cost you
Most minute values do not divide evenly into hundredths of an hour. Twenty minutes is exactly one third of an hour, 0.3333…, and no number of decimal places will ever close that off. Two places is the convention because it matches the cent, and the residue is tiny: at most 0.005 of an hour, which is 18 seconds.
| Minutes | Exact | Rounded | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | 0.33333… | 0.33 | −0.00333 h (12 s) |
| 25 | 0.41666… | 0.42 | +0.00333 h (12 s) |
| 40 | 0.66666… | 0.67 | +0.00333 h (12 s) |
| 50 | 0.83333… | 0.83 | −0.00333 h (12 s) |
At $25 an hour, 0.00333 hours is about eight cents. It is invisible on one line and it does not accumulate in one direction, because the roundings go up about as often as they go down. What does accumulate is rounding the wrong thing: a payroll rule that rounds every punch to the nearest quarter hour can move real money, and that is a policy question rather than an arithmetic one. The guide on rounding time cards covers which schemes are defensible.
A spreadsheet warning: Excel and Google Sheets store times as fractions of a day, not an hour. If a cell shows 7:45 and you want 7.75, multiply by 24 and format the result as a number. Multiplying by 100, or formatting the time cell as a number without the ×24, gives you 0.32 — a number that is correct for days and useless for payroll.
Avoid these
How the conversion usually goes wrong
Dropping the colon and calling it done
Turning 6:30 into 6.30 by deleting one character is the single most common error on a handwritten timesheet. The correct value is 6.50, and the shortfall is twelve minutes per entry.
Dividing by 100
Minutes are sixtieths. 45 ÷ 100 = 0.45 is not three quarters of anything. The divisor is always 60, in both directions.
Converting each day before adding
Covered in example 2 above, and worth repeating because it is the error that scales: five roundings instead of one. Sum in whole minutes, convert once.
Assuming a decimal total tells you about overtime
39.86 and 39.50 are both under forty, but a converted total says nothing about which hours are premium. Federal FLSA overtime in the US is 1.5× the regular rate after 40 hours in a workweek, and some states add a daily threshold on top. Feed the clean total into the overtime calculator rather than eyeballing it.
Under the hood
How this converter avoids drift
Whatever you type is parsed into whole minutes first, and the arithmetic from that point is integer arithmetic on minutes. The decimal is produced only at the output stage and rounded to two places, so you never see an artefact like 7.329999999. Typing 7:20 gives 7.33, and typing 7.33 back gives 7:20 — the round trip closes.
The input parser accepts 7, 745, 7:45, 7.45 and 7h45 style entries, which means you can paste from a clock readout or a note without tidying it up first. All 50 automated unit tests that guard the site's formulas include round-trip cases in both directions. Nothing you enter leaves your browser: there is no network request, no account and no stored history. The how it works page documents the parsing rules in full, and the guide on converting minutes to decimal hours works through the maths at a slower pace.
Frequently asked questions
Common questions
How many decimal hours is 7 hours 20 minutes?
7.33 decimal hours. Divide the minutes by 60 and add the whole hours: 20 ÷ 60 = 0.3333, so 7 + 0.33 = 7.33.
The exact value is 7.3333 recurring, because 20 minutes is precisely one third of an hour and never resolves into a finite decimal. Payroll rounds it to two places, which is accurate to within about twelve seconds. Writing 7.20 instead is the common mistake — that value means 7 hours 12 minutes, eight minutes less than you worked.
How do you convert hours and minutes to decimal?
Keep the hours as they are and divide the minutes by 60. For 6 hours 45 minutes: 45 ÷ 60 = 0.75, so the answer is 6.75. For 9 hours 10 minutes: 10 ÷ 60 = 0.1667, giving 9.17.
Round to two decimal places, which is what payroll systems expect. If you are converting several days, add the minutes together first and convert the single total — converting each day separately rounds repeatedly and can push a weekly figure off by twenty minutes or more.
What is 45 minutes in decimal hours?
0.75 hours. Forty-five minutes is three quarters of an hour, and 45 ÷ 60 = 0.75 exactly, with no rounding needed.
It is one of four values worth memorising, along with 15 minutes = 0.25, 30 minutes = 0.50 and 60 minutes = 1.00. If your employer rounds punches to the nearest quarter hour, every total on your time card will be made from those four numbers, so recognising them lets you check a payslip without a calculator.
Is 1.5 hours the same as 1 hour 50 minutes?
No. 1.5 hours is 1 hour 30 minutes, because the .5 means half an hour rather than fifty minutes. One hour 50 minutes in decimal is 1.83.
This is the trap that makes decimal hours worth a dedicated converter: the digits after the point are a fraction of 60, not a count of minutes. The two forms only coincide at whole hours. Whenever you see a decimal time, multiply the fractional part by 60 to get back to real minutes.
What is 8.25 hours in hours and minutes?
8 hours 15 minutes. Take the fractional part and multiply by 60: 0.25 × 60 = 15 minutes, which joins the 8 whole hours to give 8:15.
The same method handles any decimal. 8.6 hours gives 0.6 × 60 = 36 minutes, so 8:36 — not 8:60, and not 8:06. Project trackers and billing tools usually report decimals, so this is the direction freelancers and contractors need most when filling in a timesheet by hand.
Why does payroll use decimal hours instead of minutes?
Because pay is a multiplication. A rate of $22.50 an hour times 7.75 hours is a single calculation that produces $174.38 directly. Try that with 7 hours 45 minutes and you have to split the hours from the minutes, pay each separately and recombine.
Decimal hours also sit naturally in spreadsheets and accounting systems, which work in base ten. Clock faces and schedules stay in hours and minutes because that is how people read time, so one conversion step between the two is unavoidable.
How do I convert time to decimal in Excel or Google Sheets?
Multiply the time cell by 24 and format the result as a plain number. Spreadsheets store times as fractions of a day, so a cell showing 7:45 actually holds 0.3229. Multiplying by 24 converts days to hours and gives 7.75.
Formatting the time cell as a number without the ×24 leaves you with 0.32, which is a correct figure for days and meaningless for payroll. Two other habits help: use the =SUM() of the raw time cells before converting, and format the sum as [h]:mm so totals past 24 hours do not wrap to zero.
How accurate is rounding decimal hours to two places?
Accurate to within 0.005 of an hour, which is 18 seconds. The largest residues come from minutes that are not multiples of three: 20 minutes is exactly 0.3333 recurring and reports as 0.33, losing about twelve seconds, while 25 minutes reports as 0.42 and gains twelve.
Because some values round up and others round down, the errors mostly cancel rather than drift in one direction. At typical hourly rates the per-entry difference is a few cents. What does move real money is a policy that rounds the punch times themselves, not the decimal conversion.
Does this time to decimal converter work in both directions?
Yes. The two boxes are linked: type hours and minutes in one and the decimal appears in the other, or type a decimal and the h:mm form appears. There is no convert button, and no need to choose a direction before you start.
The round trip is exact to the minute, so entering 7:20 gives 7.33 and entering 7.33 gives 7:20 back. Times are parsed into whole minutes and the arithmetic is done on those integers, so the decimal is only produced at the final step — there is no floating-point residue in the output.
Do I need to install anything or create an account?
No. The converter is a static page and every calculation runs inside your own browser. There is no sign-up, no network request when you type, and nothing you enter is stored on a server or sent anywhere.
The minutes-to-decimal table on this page is generated by the same code that powers the converter, so the two can never disagree, and the formulas are covered by 50 automated unit tests. You can print the page to keep the table next to a time clock, which works offline once loaded.
Read next
Guides that explain the numbers
Last reviewed 1 November 2026 by the Hours Calculator Online team. Spotted a problem? Tell us and we will fix it.