Time Card Calculator

How the time card calculator counts hours

1. Each punch is read as a clock time and, if you chose rounding, rounded to the nearest 5, 6 or 15 minutes.
2. Each OUT is placed after its IN — the next morning if needed — and the pairs of a day (up to three) are added. A shift that crosses midnight stays on the day it started, even when midnight begins a new workweek.
3. Unpaid lunch is subtracted: the minutes you enter, or the automatic deduction on single-shift days.
4. The week is split into regular, overtime and double time under the rules you picked, and multiplied by the rate if you entered one.

Overtime rules: federal and California

Under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, a non-exempt employee earns 1.5 times the regular rate for hours over 40 in a workweek — a fixed, recurring period of seven consecutive days that the employer sets. There is no federal daily overtime: a single 12-hour day in a 36-hour week is all regular time.

California adds daily rules. Hours over 8 in a workday are paid at 1.5 times and hours over 12 at 2 times. On the seventh consecutive day worked in one workweek, the first 8 hours are paid at 1.5 times and hours beyond 8 at 2 times. Straight-time hours over 40 in the week are overtime too, but an hour already paid as daily overtime is not counted a second time.

The California example above shows all of it: Monday to Friday give 40 regular hours plus one daily overtime hour on Monday and four overtime and one double-time hour on the 13-hour Wednesday; Saturday's 4 hours are weekly overtime; Sunday is the seventh straight day, so its 10 hours are 8 at 1.5 times and 2 at double time. That is 40 regular, 17 overtime and 3 double-time hours — $1,430.00 at $20 an hour.

Other states with daily overtime (Alaska, Nevada, Colorado) and alternative workweek schedules are not modelled here, and the regular rate for overtime can include bonuses and shift differentials that an hourly rate alone does not capture.

Time card calculator with lunch

A bona fide meal period — usually 30 minutes or more, with the employee fully relieved of duty — is not work time; short breaks of about 5 to 20 minutes are paid. If the time card shows a punch out and back in for lunch, enter both pairs and the gap is left out automatically; a punched gap shorter than 20 minutes is flagged, because it is usually a paid rest break. If lunch was not punched, deduct it per day or automatically. California generally requires a meal period of at least 30 minutes for a workday over five hours; this calculator subtracts the time you enter but does not check meal-period compliance or premiums.

Rounding and decimal hours

Rounding applies to each punch, not to the daily total, the way time clocks and payroll systems round. Federal rules accept rounding to the nearest 5 minutes, tenth of an hour or quarter hour if it does not, over time, shortchange employees. In California, employers may not round meal-period punches (Donohue v. AMN Services, 2021), and this calculator rounds every punch it is given, lunch punches included — so for California cards, choose exact minutes.

Time clock calculator for punch cards

Mechanical time clocks print punches in 12-hour time — often without AM or PM, sometimes with afternoon punches in red — or in 24-hour time. Leave the time format on “Detect” and the calculator reads 15:02 as 24-hour time and places a 12-hour punch after the one before it, punch by punch; add AM/PM to shifts of 12 hours or more. For a whole stack of cards, the time card scanner reads photos of the cards into this same grid and exports the team's hours as a CSV.

Payroll hours are also what your workers' comp premium is built on: carriers charge a rate per $100 of payroll for each class code. See the workers' comp premium calculator and the class code directory.