Dates and Days

Hours calculator

How many hours between two times — and a week of them

One shift or a whole timesheet. Overnight shifts, unpaid breaks and payroll rounding are all handled, and the answer names the convention it applied.

Hours worked— Decimal— Gross span— Break— Rounding—
—

A week of shifts

The same rounding and break rules apply to every row. Leave a day blank if it was not worked.

DayStartEndBreakHours
Monday —
Tuesday —
Wednesday —
Thursday —
Friday —
Saturday —
Sunday —
Week total—
Week total— Decimal— Regular— Overtime— Days worked—

Why a duration is not a time of day

Nine hours is written “9h 00m” on this page, never “09:00”, because those are different things and confusing them is a real source of error. A time of day is a position on the clock; a duration is a length. They are formatted differently here deliberately, and the decimal figure beside each total is the one a payroll field usually wants.

Rounding applies to the punches, not the total

This is the part that surprises people, and it changes the answer. Suppose you clock in at 09:08 and out at 17:07, and the employer rounds to the nearest quarter hour. Rounding the punches gives 09:15 and 17:00, which is seven hours forty-five. Subtracting first gives seven hours fifty-nine, which rounds to eight hours. The same two punches, a quarter of an hour apart, depending only on the order of operations — and payroll systems round the punches. So does this page, and the readout says when a rounding actually moved something.

Rounding practices are regulated, and the rules differ by jurisdiction and by what the rounding does on average over time. This page computes whichever convention you select and does not recommend one; it is a calculator, not advice about which rule applies to you.

Shifts that cross midnight

An end time earlier than the start is read as crossing midnight, so 22:00 to 06:00 is eight hours and the answer says so. A plain subtraction returns minus sixteen hours, which is the commonest way a night shift is mis-totalled — and because the sign is obviously wrong, it usually gets noticed. The dangerous version is a spreadsheet that silently clamps it to zero.

What this page does not do

It has no opinion about pay rates, and it does not multiply anything by an hourly figure. It also does not know about daylight saving: a shift is a span of clock time with no date attached, so a night in March when the clocks move is one hour shorter or longer than the arithmetic here suggests. That is a genuine limitation rather than an oversight — handling it needs a date as well as a time, and mixing those two is exactly how the date calculators on this site avoid the same class of bug.

Questions

How many hours is 9 to 5:30 with a 30 minute lunch?
Eight hours. The span from 09:00 to 17:30 is eight and a half, and the half-hour break comes off it. Enter the two times and the break above and the answer appears in both forms you are likely to need: eight hours and no minutes for a human, and 8.00 for a payroll field, which are the same number written two ways and are worth checking against each other.
How do I work out a shift that goes past midnight?
Just enter it. A finish time earlier than the start time is read as crossing midnight, so 22:00 to 06:00 comes out as eight hours rather than as minus sixteen, and the answer says explicitly that it treated the shift as overnight. A plain subtraction gives the negative figure, which is the single most common way an overnight shift is mis-totalled.
Why does rounding change my total by more than I expect?
Because the rounding is applied to each clock time, not to the total, and that is what payroll systems do. Punches of 09:08 and 17:07 rounded to the nearest quarter hour become 09:15 and 17:00, which is seven hours forty-five. Subtracting first gives seven hours fifty-nine, which rounds to eight hours. The two methods differ by a full quarter of an hour on the same pair of punches, so it matters which one is being used.
What counts as overtime here?
Anything above the weekly threshold in the control, which starts at forty hours because that is the federal standard for most covered employees. Exactly forty hours is not overtime; forty hours and one minute is one minute of overtime. Some states use a daily threshold instead of, or as well as, a weekly one, so the per-day figures are shown alongside the weekly total. This page computes what you ask it to; it is not advice about which rule applies to you.
Does anything I type here get uploaded?
No, and not as a matter of policy. This page is a static file and a script your browser downloads once; there is no server behind it to receive anything. The times you enter are read by the script in your own browser and the totals are written back into the same page. Nothing is sent, nothing is stored, and no analytics or third-party script runs here.