Add up your hours worked from a start and end time. Enter your clock-in and clock-out times and any unpaid break, and see the hours in hours-and-minutes, in decimal, and your pay.
Handles overnight shifts (end time before start time). Break time is subtracted as unpaid. Pay is gross, before taxes.
Subtract your start time from your end time, then take off any unpaid break. This tool does the math — including overnight shifts — and shows the result in hours-and-minutes and as decimal hours (what payroll uses). A 9:00–5:00 shift with a 30-minute break is 7 hours 30 minutes, or 7.5 decimal hours.
Two clock times and a break are not a payroll number. Payroll runs on decimal hours, and the job of this page is the conversion between the way people talk about a shift ("nine to five, half an hour for lunch") and the way a pay run consumes it. Everything else here — the overnight handling, the optional rate — exists to stop that conversion going wrong in the two ways it usually does.
The calculator opens at a 9:00 start, a 17:00 finish and a 30-minute unpaid break. Nine to five is 8 hours, or 480 minutes. Subtract the 30-minute break and you have 450 minutes, which the tool reports two ways: 7h 30m and 7.5 hours. Five of those shifts is 37.5 hours — under 40, so no overtime — and at $20 an hour the week is $750.
Here is why both formats are shown. Typing "7.30" into a payroll sheet because the shift was seven hours thirty minutes records 7.3 hours, not 7.5. The gap is 0.2 of an hour — 12 minutes — worth $4 a shift at $20 an hour, $20 across a five-day week, and roughly $1,040 over a working year for one person. It is the single most common timesheet error we see, and it is invisible because 7.30 looks like a correct transcription of the clock.
The overnight case is the other trap. A shift running 22:00 to 06:30 with the same 30-minute break looks like negative time to a naive subtraction: 6:30 minus 22:00 is −930 minutes. The tool adds a day when the end time precedes the start, giving 510 minutes of elapsed time and, after the break, 480 minutes — exactly 8.00 hours. If your own sheet returns a negative or an absurd figure for a night shift, that is the missing step.
This is where the number stops being arithmetic and becomes a question of fact. The Department of Labor's guidance on hours worked draws a line that the break field on this page quietly depends on: "Bona fide meal periods (typically 30 minutes or more) generally need not be compensated as work time," but "the employee must be completely relieved from duty for the purpose of eating regular meals." Eating at the desk while answering the phone is not a bona fide meal period; that time is worked time. Separately, "rest periods of short duration, usually 20 minutes or less, are common in industry and are customarily paid for as working time."
So the rule of thumb for the break box is: enter a genuine, duty-free meal period of about 30 minutes or more, and enter nothing for short coffee breaks. Deducting a 20-minute rest break as if it were unpaid takes 0.33 of an hour off every shift — about $6.67 a day at $20 an hour, and roughly $1,733 a year across five shifts a week.
One shift is one subtraction. A week is a timesheet, and a month across several people is a payroll file that has to reconcile against what you invoiced. At that point you want the hours sitting in the same workbook as the wage cost and the jobs they were spent on — which is what our small business bookkeeping template is for, with the labour line feeding straight into the profit figure instead of living in a separate app. For the intermediate steps, the time card calculator totals a full five-day week and splits anything past 40, and the time and a half calculator prices those overtime hours once you have them.
Take the end time minus the start time, subtract the unpaid break, and convert to decimal hours by dividing the minutes by 60. Enter your times above and the tool does it, including overnight shifts.
7.5 hours. Payroll uses decimal hours, so 30 minutes = 0.5, 15 minutes = 0.25, and 45 minutes = 0.75.
Related: overtime calculator · hourly to salary · days between dates.
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Yes. The Hours Calculator is completely free, runs in your browser, and never asks for a signup, email, or download. Enter your numbers and the result updates instantly.
It uses standard formulas and recalculates the moment you change a value, so the math is exact for the inputs you enter. Treat the result as a reliable planning estimate; for decisions with legal or tax consequences, confirm the figures with a qualified professional.
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Last reviewed: September 2026. Free to use, no signup — Hours Calculator by ToolWise Digital.
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