Hours Worked Calculator

Hours worked is defined not by the clock face alone but by the legal concept of suffered or permitted work: all time an employee is required to be on duty, on the employer premises, or at a prescribed workplace counts as compensable time under 29 CFR part 785. The arithmetic here converts two wall-clock times into elapsed minutes, adds 1,440 minutes when the end time precedes the start time so that overnight shifts resolve correctly, subtracts unpaid break minutes, and divides by 60. The decimal-hour output matters because payroll systems multiply rate by decimal hours rather than by hours and minutes: 7 hours 45 minutes is 7.75, 15 minutes is 0.25, and a single minute is about 0.0167 hours. Practical ranges follow the standard 8-hour day, 40-hour week, and 2,080-hour year, though 12-hour hospital and continuous-process shifts and 10-hour compressed weeks are common. Two caveats limit any simple subtraction. First, employers may round punches to 5-, 6-, or 15-minute increments, and the FLSA tolerates this only where rounding is neutral over time rather than systematically favoring the employer. Second, an unpaid meal deduction is lawful only when the employee is genuinely relieved of duty; automatic 30-minute lunch deductions applied to workers who ate at their stations are among the most frequently litigated wage claims. The pay figure shown is gross and pre-tax, and excludes overtime premiums, shift differentials, and tips.

Recording hours worked became a mechanical problem before it became a legal one. Willard Bundy, a jeweler in Auburn, New York, patented a workman time recorder in 1888, and the Bundy Manufacturing Company he founded with his brother was folded in 1911 into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, renamed International Business Machines in 1924. Punch-card and dial recorders standardized the practice of stamping arrival and departure times, and with it the expectation that pay would track measured elapsed time rather than custom, day rates, or piece counts. The legal architecture followed in the 1930s and 1940s. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 made accurate time records a statutory duty of the employer, and in Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co. in 1946 the Supreme Court held that where an employer keeps inadequate records, employees may prove their hours by just and reasonable inference. Congress responded with the Portal-to-Portal Act of 1947, which excluded ordinary commuting and most preliminary and postliminary activities from compensable time. The Wage and Hour Division codified the resulting rules in 29 CFR part 785, covering short rest periods, waiting time, on-call time, and travel, and those regulations still govern how a raw shift span becomes paid hours.