Minutes to Decimal Converter

A timesheet total like 7 hours 45 minutes is fine for a human and useless to a payroll system. Pay is hours multiplied by a rate, and 7:45 is not a number you can multiply. 7.75 is the same amount of time written so the arithmetic works.

The hours part never changes. Only the minutes need converting, and the rule is one line: divide the minutes by 60. So 45 minutes becomes 0.75, and 7 hours 45 minutes becomes 7.75.

Going the other way, multiply the decimal by 60. 0.4 hours is 24 minutes. This catches people out because 0.4 looks like it should be 40 minutes and it is not.

Quarter hours are easy. 15 is 0.25, 30 is 0.5, 45 is 0.75, and most people know those without looking. The trouble is everything else.

20 minutes is a third of an hour, so 0.3333 forever. 40 minutes is two thirds, 0.6667. Written on a timesheet they become 0.33 and 0.67, and each one quietly drops about two seconds. One person for one day, that is nothing. A team of thirty logging two entries a day for a year, and it stops being nothing.

That is why the chart shows three decimal places beside two. If your payroll system accepts three, use them. If it only takes two, at least you can see what the rounding removed rather than wondering later where the time went.

Every conversion done by hand is a chance to fumble a digit, and the ones that get fumbled are the awkward values nobody double-checks. The safest timesheet is the one where nobody typed a decimal.

That is the case for recording time as it happens. Timesheets total the hours already in decimal, per client and project, and route the period to an approver before it reaches payroll.

If you need whole times rather than the minutes part, the hours to decimal converter takes an HH:MM value, and the minutes to hours converter handles spans longer than an hour.