Work Hours Calculator

Take the end time, subtract the start time, then subtract any unpaid break. That is the whole method. The fiddly part is that clock times are in base 60 and pay is in base 10, so doing it in your head is where mistakes creep in.

Say you start at 8:45 and finish at 17:20, with a 30 minute lunch. The gap is 8 hours 35 minutes. Take off the break and you worked 8 hours 5 minutes. For payroll that is 8.08 hours, not 8.05.

This is the error that actually costs people money. 8 hours 45 minutes is 8.75 hours, not 8.45. Minutes go up to 60 and decimals go up to 100, so you divide the minutes by 60 to convert. 45 divided by 60 is 0.75.

Getting it wrong by that much on one shift is 18 minutes of pay. Repeat it every day for a fortnight and it is most of a working day. The calculator above shows both formats side by side so you never have to guess which one your payroll system wants.

If you only need the conversion, use the minutes to hours converter or the hours to decimal converter.

Only unpaid breaks come off the total. A paid ten minute tea break stays in. If your state requires a 30 minute unpaid meal break on a shift over a certain length, that one comes off, and it comes off whether or not anyone actually took it away from their desk.

A shift that finishes earlier in the day than it started has crossed midnight, and the calculator reads it that way rather than returning a negative number. So 22:00 to 06:00 is 8 hours.

This page handles one shift at a time. For a full week with overtime and gross pay, use the time card calculator, and for the break rules on their own see the break calculator.