Hours Worked Calculator

What counts as hours worked under federal law

The Fair Labor Standards Act defines work in a way that is broader than most people expect. The legal phrase is "suffer or permit to work", which means an employer has to pay for any time they allowed you to work, whether or not they asked for it and whether or not it was on the schedule.

In practice the test is not how hard you were working. It is whether you were free to do what you wanted with the time. Finishing a task after your shift ends counts. Answering one email before bed counts. Sitting in a break room waiting for a delivery that has to be signed for counts. The Department of Labor fact sheet on hours worked sets out the examples, and the table below is the short version.

Two of those rows cause most of the disputes. The first is the meal break, where the question is not whether you ate but whether you worked. The second is the training row, where all four conditions have to be met at once for the time to be unpaid, and the fourth one is the one employers forget: if any real work happens during the session, the whole thing is hours worked.

Breaks: the 20 minute rule and why lunch is different

Federal law does not require an employer to give you any break at all, paid or unpaid. Many states do require them, and those state rules are usually the ones that apply to you. What federal law does is decide which breaks have to be paid once an employer offers them.

The line sits at about 20 minutes. A short rest break of that length or less is common in industry and promotes efficiency, in the words of the regulation, and it must be counted as hours worked. A real meal period of 30 minutes or more does not have to be paid, but only if you are completely relieved of duty for the whole of it.

That meal break rule has a catch employers sometimes miss. If you have to stay at your desk, keep an ear on the phone, watch the front counter or remain available in any way, you have not been relieved of duty, and the half hour has to be paid. An authorised break that runs long is a different matter: an employer can refuse to pay the extra minutes, but only if they told you clearly how long the break could be, that going over was against the rules, and that going over would be disciplined.

Rounding to the nearest 15 minutes

Most timekeeping systems do not record the exact minute you clocked in. They round. Federal rules allow this, but only within set increments and only if it comes out fair over time. The regulation at 29 CFR 785.48 permits rounding to the nearest 5 minutes, one tenth of an hour, one quarter of an hour, or half an hour, and says the rounding has to average out so that employees are paid for all the time they worked.

The key word is nearest. A system that always rounds down, or that rounds 7 minutes of work down to zero and 8 minutes of work up to a full quarter hour in the employer's favour, is not legal rounding. Over a year the rule has to land somewhere close to neutral.

Here is what the four allowed increments do to the same day. Clock in at 9:07, clock out at 5:03, no break taken, paid at $20.00 an hour.

The gap between the exact figure and the 15 minute figure is $1.33 a day, which is about $346 over a year of 260 days. Small, but it is your money and it is worth knowing which column your employer is using. The 6 minute rule is the gentlest of the four, because one tenth of an hour moves the clock in 6 minute steps instead of 15.

Rounding is applied to clock in and clock out times before the day is totalled, not to the total at the end. That distinction matters on a day with a break in the middle, where each punch gets rounded separately.

Worked example: a 9:00 to 5:26 day

Run through the default numbers on this page. Clock in at 09:00, clock out at 17:26, a 30 minute unpaid lunch, and a 15 minute rounding rule.

• Time on site. 17:26 minus 09:00 is 8 h 26 min.
• Take out the unpaid lunch. 8 h 26 min minus 30 min is 7 h 56 min. This is the number before any rounding.
• Apply the rounding rule. 476 minutes divided by 15 is 31.73, which rounds to 32, so 32 quarters is 8 h 00 min.
• Convert to decimal hours for payroll. 8.00 hours.
• Multiply by the rate. At $18.00 an hour that is $144.00 for the day.
• Scale it up. Five days a week is $720.00, and 52 weeks is $37,440.00 a year.

Now take a second day with a break that is not a clean quarter of an hour. Clock in at 08:47, clock out at 17:05, and a 45 minute unpaid lunch. Time on site is 8 h 18 min, minus 45 minutes is 7 h 33 min, and 453 minutes divided by 15 is 30.2, which rounds down to 30 quarters. Paid hours come to 7 h 30 min, or 7.50 decimal hours, which is $165.00 at $22.00 an hour. That is $825.00 a week and $42,900.00 a year at five days.

The rounding went down on that one, and that is allowed, because the rule has to be neutral across the whole of your time rather than generous on every single day. If you find it rounding down on nearly every shift, that is the thing worth raising.

One more, with overtime in it. Clock in at 07:00, clock out at 18:00 with a 30 minute lunch: 11 h 00 min on site, 10 h 30 min after the break, 10.50 decimal hours, and 2 h 30 min of hours over the 8 hour daily mark. At $20.00 an hour the day is $210.00 before any overtime premium is applied.

Exempt and non-exempt: who has to clock in at all

Roughly half of the people reading a page like this do not have a time card at all. Whether you do comes down to one classification, and it changes almost everything about how your hours are handled.

The threshold is not one number everywhere. The federal rule sets a salary floor and a duties test, several states set a higher floor, and the federal level has moved around through rule changes and court decisions in recent years, so the figure you may have read a couple of years ago can be out of date. Job title decides nothing here. A person called a manager who spends most of the day doing the same work as the team, and who does not direct anyone, can be misclassified, and misclassification is the single most common wage problem in the country.

For anyone who is exempt, this calculator is still useful for a different reason. If you are salary and working 55 hours a week, dividing your pay by the hours you put in tells you what the job is worth per hour, and that number is worth knowing before the next review.

Timekeeping systems, and what each one gets wrong

The machine doing the recording shapes the mistakes you will find. Four systems cover most workplaces in the country.

• Badge or biometric terminal. Punching in at a shared terminal on the wall. The usual problems are the queue at shift change, which pushes your recorded start time later than your real one, and a terminal that has drifted a few minutes off the real clock.
• Web or app clock. Punching in from a phone or a browser. Watch for location rules that stop you clocking in until you are on site, and for an app that cannot log a second break.
• Paper time card. Still common in small shops and on job sites. Errors here are almost always arithmetic, or a round number written the same way every day, like 8:00 and 4:30 regardless of what happened.
• No clock at all. A manager records hours, or a spreadsheet is filled in at the end of the week. This is where hours get lost, because nobody is writing down the fifteen minutes before the shift or the call that came in after it.

Whichever system you have, the rule of thumb is the same: check the numbers every week rather than at the end of the month. A discrepancy is far easier to fix on the Tuesday it happened than four weeks later, and most payroll systems keep a short window for corrections.

Mistakes that quietly cost you money

These are the errors that show up again and again in wage complaints, and none of them are exotic.

• Automatic lunch deduction. The system takes out 30 minutes every day whether you took it or not. If you worked through lunch, the deduction is not allowed.
• Rounding that only ever goes one way. A system that turns 7:58 into 8:00 and 8:02 into 8:00 is rounding in one direction, and that fails the federal test.
• Start up time before the clock. Logging in, booting a computer, walking to a workstation in a large site, or putting on required gear are hours worked in many jobs.
• Work after the punch out. Closing up, finishing a ticket, or answering a message on the way to the car. All of it is hours worked.
• Training and meetings. A mandatory session is hours worked unless it meets all four conditions at once, and having any real work in it breaks the exemption.
• Someone else editing your card. A manager shortening a shift to avoid overtime is not allowed. Changing a card to make it accurate is fine, but you should be told.
• Breaks that are not free of work. Being on call during a meal period makes it paid time.

Add the small ones up before dismissing them. Six unpaid minutes a day is 30 minutes a week, which is about 26 hours a year. At $18.00 an hour that is roughly $468 of work nobody paid for, and it is also six minutes you were not allowed to leave.

Keeping your own record when nobody is clocking you

If you have no clock to punch, keeping your own record is the cheapest protection available. It costs a notebook and about ten seconds a day, and it is the only thing that settles an argument about hours with any weight behind it.

Write down four things each day: the time you started, the time you stopped, any break you took and whether it was interrupted, and anything unusual like staying late or a training session. Do it the same day, because reconstructing last Tuesday from memory four weeks later produces a number nobody trusts, including you.

When your own numbers and the payroll numbers do not match, the order to work through is boring but effective. Check the pay period first, since a week that runs Sunday to Saturday and one that runs Monday to Sunday can look like a whole shift missing. Check the break deductions next. Then take the specific days and the specific times to payroll or to HR, in writing, with your notes attached, and ask for the correction rather than the explanation.

If that does not work, you do not have to give up on it. The Department of Labor takes wage complaints, and the Wage and Hour Division pages on overtime and back pay explain how a claim is filed and what records you need. Most states have their own labour agency as well, and several of them move faster than the federal one.

This page works out gross pay from the times you enter, using general federal rules. It does not know your employer's rounding policy, your state's break rules or your overtime agreement, and it is not legal advice. For a dispute about real wages, talk to your state labour agency or to a lawyer who handles wage claims.