Time Card Calculator

Time Cards, Overtime, and Getting Paid Right

The workweek is the legal unit

The FLSA defines overtime on a fixed, recurring 168-hour workweek your employer designates — not the calendar week, not the pay period. Hours past 40 in that window earn at least 1.5× the regular rate, which legally includes nondiscretionary bonuses and shift differentials, not just base hourly pay (a detail that inflates OT rates above the naive 1.5× base, and one payroll systems occasionally miss). California, Alaska, Nevada, and Colorado add daily overtime — in CA, 1.5× past 8 hours in a day and 2× past 12, regardless of the weekly total.

Quarter-hour entry and rounding

This card takes hours in 0.25 steps because most payroll rounds to quarter hours. The conversion habit worth building: minutes ÷ 60, so 7:50 is 7.83, rounding to 7.75 under standard rules. Rounding must be even-handed over time — systems that round starts up and ends down are running an unlawful one-way ratchet, and wage-and-hour audits look for exactly that pattern.

Common leaks in weekly totals

Unpaid work has patterns: pre-shift setup and post-shift closing ('donning and doffing' in the case law), auto-deducted lunches worked through, mandatory meetings and training, and travel between job sites mid-day — all compensable under the FLSA. Off-the-clock work claims make up a large share of wage settlements. A personal log kept alongside the official system, even just for a few weeks, is what turns 'I think I'm underpaid' into a documented claim.

Overtime in practice: three weeks, three verdicts

The 40-hour rule sounds simple until real schedules hit it. Three common patterns show where paychecks and law actually meet:

The middle row is the one that surprises people in both directions: a compressed 4×10 schedule is overtime-free federally, while a California employee on the same schedule is owed two daily-OT hours every workday unless the employer ran a formal alternative-workweek election. The bottom row is the most common employer "mistake" in wage litigation — pay periods are accounting units; workweeks are the legal unit, and they never average.

The regular rate: why 1.5× base is sometimes underpayment

Overtime pays time-and-a-half of the regular rate, and the regular rate is not simply your hourly wage. The FLSA folds in nondiscretionary bonuses, shift differentials, commissions, and most incentive pay: a $20/hour worker with a $100 weekly production bonus across a 45-hour week has a regular rate of $22.22, making the OT rate $33.33 rather than $30 — a $16.67 underpayment that week if payroll used base rate, recurring every bonus period. Truly discretionary bonuses, gifts, expense reimbursements, and premium pay itself stay out of the calculation. This is among the most commonly miscomputed items in payroll, partly because it requires retroactive recalculation when bonuses cover multiple weeks, and it's worth a one-time check of your own stub in any job mixing hourly pay with regular bonuses or differentials. Tipped work adds its own layer — the federal tip credit lets employers pay $2.13 in cash wages, but overtime still computes on the full minimum wage, not the cash wage, another spot where the mechanical 1.5×-what-I-see math undercounts.

What people get wrong

• Assuming salaried means no overtime. Exemption requires a duties test plus a salary threshold — job titles and salary alone exempt no one, and misclassified "managers" who mostly do line work recover back OT regularly.
• Counting PTO toward the 40. Federal OT triggers on hours worked; a 32-worked + 8-holiday week pays 40 straight hours unless policy is more generous. Plan OT-dependent budgets around worked time.
• Letting the timekeeping system be the only record. Auto-deducted lunches, pre-shift setup, and post-close duties are the classic off-the-clock categories. A parallel personal log costs one line a day and is the difference between a hunch and a claim.
• Missing the seventh-day and double-time rules where they exist. California owes 1.5× for the first 8 hours of a seventh consecutive workday and 2× beyond — a rule invisible to anyone reasoning only from the federal 40.

Building a time-card habit that protects you

The audit posture above needs raw material, and the sustainable version costs under a minute a day. Log four things per shift in any notebook or notes app: actual start, actual end, real break minutes taken, and a one-word task note for anything unusual — the setup before clock-in, the working lunch, the closing duties after punch-out. Contemporaneous notes carry evidentiary weight that reconstructed timelines never match; wage-and-hour attorneys open intake conversations by asking whether any personal record exists, because the employer's system alone frames every dispute in the employer's data. Photograph or export your official time entries at each pay period while access is fresh — portal access has a way of ending with employment, exactly when the records matter most. For managers reading the same page: the mirrored best practices are honest punch policies, no off-the-clock expectations, break attestation instead of auto-deduction, and edits that are logged and explained — the same disciplines that protect workers are the ones that survive Department of Labor audits, and the settlement statistics suggest most violations are sloppy systems rather than malice, which makes them preventable by exactly this kind of hygiene.

Gig platforms and the time-card question they dodge

App-based work sits deliberately outside this page's legal framework — independent contractors have no FLSA overtime, no minimum wage guarantee federally, and no employer time-card at all — which makes personal time tracking more valuable there, not less. The number gig workers chronically miscompute is effective hourly earnings: platform dashboards report engaged time (active delivery or ride), while true hours include the waiting, positioning, and returning that can double the denominator. A driver grossing $25/engaged-hour across a day that was 40% idle earned $15/true-hour before vehicle costs — and the IRS mileage rate (70¢/mile in 2025) approximates those costs well enough that revenue minus miles-times-rate divided by true hours is the honest wage. That per-hour truth is the input every real decision needs: which platforms deserve your hours, which time blocks pay, whether the W-2 job across town actually pays less. Several states and cities have begun mandating engaged-time minimum rates for app workers, with the same lesson embedded: the definition of a compensable hour is the entire fight, and whoever keeps the better record wins their version of it. The classification line itself keeps moving — the federal contractor test has changed twice since 2021, and California's ABC test reclassified whole industries — so a clean personal log of hours, control, and instructions is also the record that decides which side of the employee line the work actually falls on, should that question ever be worth asking.

Where the rules come from

Federal overtime is FLSA §7, with the regular-rate inclusions detailed in 29 CFR Part 778 and the compensable-time definitions in Part 785 — the same regulation family covering rounding neutrality (785.48) and meal periods (785.19). The workweek's fixed-168-hour definition sits in 778.105. Exemption duties tests live in Part 541. State overtime layers come from state wage orders — California's daily-OT and seventh-day rules are Labor Code §510 — and the controlling standard in any conflict is whichever is more protective of the employee. Statutes of limitation for federal claims run two years, three for willful violations, which is precisely the shelf life your personal time log should have.

Frequently asked questions

Is overtime required for salaried employees?

Salary alone doesn't exempt anyone — exemption requires both a duties test (executive, administrative, professional) and a minimum salary threshold. Misclassification is common; salaried workers doing primarily non-exempt work can be owed years of back overtime.

Do PTO or holiday hours count toward the 40 for overtime?

Under federal law, no — only hours actually worked trigger OT. A week of 32 worked + 8 holiday hours pays 40 straight-time hours. Some employers and union contracts are more generous by policy.

What's double time and when does it apply?

Federal law never requires it. California mandates 2× past 12 hours in a day and past 8 on a seventh consecutive workday; elsewhere it's a matter of contract or employer policy, commonly on holidays.

Can my employer change my hours after I submit my time card?

Employers may correct genuine errors but must pay for all time actually worked — editing punches downward to cut hours worked is unlawful, and pattern-editing is a leading wage-claim fact pattern. If your submitted and paid hours diverge, ask for the reconciliation in writing; the paper trail protects both parties.

How does overtime work with two jobs at the same company?

Hours for one employer aggregate across roles and locations — 25 hours in the warehouse plus 20 at the register is a 45-hour week with 5 OT hours, paid at a blended regular rate. Two genuinely separate employers don't aggregate, which is why joint-employer status matters in staffing-agency arrangements.