Time Card Calculator

This time card calculator builds a printable weekly time report from work hours and pay rates. It takes most of the time formats people actually type, including 8:00AM, 8.30, 15:30, 5 am and 5pm, and the values can be saved in this browser so the sheet is still there next week.

Enter a start and an end time for each day, plus any unpaid break, and the report fills in underneath: a row per day, the shift summarised, the hours totalled, and pay worked out if you turn that on.

Entering hours

The From and To boxes take a clock time in whatever form comes naturally. 9, 9:00, 9am, 09:00 and 0900 all mean the same thing. Without an am or pm the entry is read as 24-hour time, so 17:30 and 5:30pm are the same instant.

A shift that runs past midnight needs no special handling. Enter 5pm to 1am and the calculator sees that the end time is earlier than the start, adds a day, and returns eight hours. That is the case most spreadsheet time sheets get wrong, because a plain subtraction gives a negative number.

Break deduction takes either 0:30 or 30 for half an hour, and the break is subtracted from the shift rather than added to the day. Only unpaid breaks belong here. A paid rest break is time worked and should be left out of this box.

The Date column is a free text field rather than a fixed weekday, so it can hold actual dates, shift names or job codes if that suits the report better.

Rounding

Recorded times rarely land on neat boundaries, and many employers round them. The calculator can round to the nearest 5, 10, 15 or 30 minutes, or to the nearest hour, and it rounds the clock times before subtracting rather than rounding the total afterwards. Those two give different answers, and rounding the times is the convention payroll uses.

Rounding is permitted under federal rules provided it is neutral over time: it has to round up as often as it rounds down, and it must not systematically work in the employer's favour. A quarter-hour scheme that always rounds down is a wage violation regardless of how small each increment looks. If in doubt, leave rounding off and record the real times, which is what the None option does.

Wages and overtime

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, unchanged since 2009. Where the state also sets a minimum wage, the employee is entitled to the higher of the two, and most states now set one above $7.25.

Non-exempt employees covered by the FLSA are entitled to an overtime rate of at least 1.5 times their standard rate for hours worked beyond 40 in a workweek. A workweek is a fixed, regularly recurring period of 168 hours, which is seven consecutive 24-hour periods. It does not have to start on a Monday, and it does not have to match the calendar week, but once set it should not be shuffled about to avoid paying overtime.

Federal law sets no daily overtime threshold, though some states do, which is why this calculator offers overtime after a set number of hours per day as well as per week. Choosing the wrong basis on a week with long shifts changes the total materially: seven nine-hour days is 63 hours either way, but overtime after 40 a week gives 23 overtime hours where overtime after 8 a day gives only 7.

Separate regulations govern what counts as hours worked, how records must be kept, and what young workers may do. The calculator handles the arithmetic; it does not decide whether a particular activity is compensable.

Exempt and non-exempt employees

Most workers are classified as either exempt or non-exempt, and the classification decides whether overtime is owed at all. Many states add their own wage and hour rules on top, so it is worth understanding the position from both sides of the payroll.

Non-exempt employees are entitled to the minimum wage and to overtime under the FLSA. Employers must pay them at least 1.5 times the standard rate beyond 40 hours in a workweek. A non-exempt employee who is not paid overtime can file a claim through the U.S. Department of Labor. Most people paid an hourly wage fall into this group.

Exempt employees are not covered by those protections and are not entitled to overtime pay. Some job types are exempt by definition, including commissioned sales employees, computer professionals, farm workers, drivers, salesmen and those performing executive, administrative or professional roles. For most professions, an employee is exempt only if all three of these hold:

1. They are paid at least the federal salary threshold, long set at $684 a week, which is $35,568 a year
2. They are paid a salary rather than an hourly wage
3. They perform exempt job duties

That salary figure is the one part of the test most likely to be out of date by the time you read it. An attempt to raise it in 2024 was struck down in federal court, returning the threshold to $684, and further revisions are likely. Check the current figure with the Department of Labor before relying on it.

Executive exemption

On top of the salary minimum, an executive employee must manage the enterprise or a recognised department within it, supervise at least two other employees, and have real input into hiring and firing decisions. Supervising nobody, or holding the title without the authority, does not qualify.

Administrative exemption

Administrative exemption also requires the salary minimum, and the employee must perform non-manual office work directly related to management or general business operations. Human resources staff, public relations, payroll and accounting typically fall here. The work has to involve independent judgement on significant matters rather than following a set procedure.

Professional exemption

This covers both learned professionals and creative professionals, and the salary minimum applies to both. A learned professional does work requiring advanced knowledge, predominantly intellectual in character, in a field of science or learning. A creative professional's work requires invention, imagination, originality or talent in a recognised artistic field. Lawyers, physicians, teachers, architects, registered nurses, writers, journalists, actors and musicians sit in these categories.

Other exemptions

Computer employees are exempt if they earn at least $684 a week in salary or are paid at least $27.63 an hour, which covers systems analysts, programmers and software engineers. The outside sales exemption applies to employees whose primary duty is making sales or obtaining orders away from the employer's place of business.

Roles that are not exempt

The exemptions above apply to white-collar work. Blue-collar workers who perform manual labour or repetitive operations requiring physical skill and energy are not covered, however well paid they are. Carpenters, electricians, mechanics, plumbers, ironworkers, craftsmen and construction workers are entitled to the minimum wage and to overtime.

The exemptions also do not reach police officers, firefighters, paramedics, correctional officers, park rangers and other first responders whose work involves preventing or fighting fire and crime, rescuing accident victims, or surveilling and apprehending suspects.

A short history of the time card

Time cards go back to the late nineteenth century as clock cards: rectangular cards printed with the hours of the day and the days of the week. Industrialisation, the growth of factory labour and the need to track hours more effectively all pushed them into use.

Willard Bundy invented the Bundy Key Recorder in 1888, a machine that printed the exact time along with a number identifying the employee, who carried a designated key. The same year, Alexander Dey built the Dey's Dial Recorder, on which employees moved a pointer arm to their allocated number around a large dial and pressed it inward to print the time beside that number.

The first machine to use clock cards proper was the Rochester Time Recorder, invented by Daniel M. Cooper in 1894. Employees carried a card and inserted it whenever a shift started or ended, and the recorder printed the time on it, leaving the company timekeeper to total the hours at the end of the week.

Demand for these machines grew through the early twentieth century, and the company that became International Business Machines built a Time Recording Division around them. Under Thomas J. Watson, IBM developed attendance recorders and time stamp systems, some printing late arrivals in red ink.

Mechanical recorders and clock cards are still in service, alongside newer methods: radio-frequency identification, magnetic cards and biometric readers. What has not changed is the arithmetic at the end of the week, which is what this page does.

Common mistakes

The first is subtracting an overnight shift the wrong way round. 5pm to 1am is eight hours, not minus sixteen, and a spreadsheet will happily report the negative.

The second is deducting paid breaks. Only unpaid time belongs in the break column; a paid rest break is hours worked and deducting it understates the pay owed.

The third is confusing decimal hours with hours and minutes. 8.5 hours is eight hours thirty minutes, not eight hours fifty. The report gives both, and the decimal figure is the one payroll systems usually want.

The fourth is averaging hours across two weeks to avoid overtime. Overtime is calculated per workweek, so 50 hours followed by 30 does not become two 40-hour weeks.

The last is treating a job title as the exemption test. The duties and the pay basis decide it, not what appears on the contract.