The week’s hours,
added up properly.

A worked example, using the defaults

Take the week the form opens with: Monday to Thursday 07:30 to 16:30 with a half-hour unpaid break, Friday 07:30 to 15:00 with the same break, weekend off.

Each of the four full days is nine hours on the clock less thirty minutes, so 8.5 hours. Friday is seven and a half hours less thirty minutes, 7 hours. The week is 34 + 7, 41 hours. Against a 40-hour threshold that is 40 hours at the basic rate and 1 hour of overtime. At time and a half on a rate of £18 an hour, the week pays 40 × £18 plus 1 × £27, which is £747. Change the Friday finish to 16:30 and the overtime becomes 2.5 hours; set the daily threshold to 8 instead and every full day carries half an hour of overtime whatever the weekly total says.

How to work out hours worked from a timesheet

Take the finish time away from the start time, in minutes, then take the unpaid break away from that. A day that runs 07:30 to 16:30 is 540 minutes; a 30-minute break makes it 510, which is 8.5 hours. Do that for each day, add the days, and you have the week. The mistake that catches most hand-written sheets is doing the arithmetic in hours and minutes as if they were decimals: 8 hours 45 minutes is 8.75, not 8.45, and a week of that error is the wrong side of two hours.

Where a shift runs past midnight, the tool treats a finish earlier than the start as the following day, so 22:00 to 06:00 is eight hours, not minus sixteen.

Breaks: paid, unpaid and the one the law requires

The calculator deducts only the break you type, because whether a break is paid is a matter for the contract, not for arithmetic. What the law requires is separate from what is paid. Under regulation 12 of the Working Time Regulations 1998, an adult worker whose day is longer than six hours is entitled to a rest break of at least 20 minutes, taken during the day rather than at either end of it. If a row on your sheet shows more than six hours and a break under 20 minutes, the tool says so. It does not say whether the break was paid, and it does not add one you did not take.

Overtime: daily, weekly, and what the law says about it

There is no statutory overtime rate in the UK. What counts as overtime and what it pays come from the contract, and the two common shapes are a weekly threshold, hours above 37.5 or 40 in the week, and a daily one, hours above eight in any day. The form lets you set either or both; where both are on, the daily rule runs first and the weekly rule applies to whatever is left. The only legal floor is that average pay for all the hours worked must not fall below the National Minimum Wage or National Living Wage for the worker’s age.

The 48-hour week, and why an average is not a cap

Regulation 4 limits an adult worker’s working time to an average of 48 hours a week, taken over a reference period that is normally 17 weeks, unless the worker has signed an opt-out. A single week of 52 hours is not a breach on its own; a run of them is. The tool flags a week over 48 so you can look at the pattern, and it flags a gap of under 11 hours between one day’s finish and the next day’s start, which is the daily rest regulation 10 provides for. Both are things to check, not findings.

Converting minutes to decimal hours

Divide the minutes by 60. Fifteen minutes is 0.25, thirty is 0.5, forty-five is 0.75, and ten minutes is 0.17 once rounded. Payroll systems and job costing both want decimals, which is why the results here show both forms: 8:45 for the person reading the sheet, 8.75 for the person keying it.

What this does not do

It does not know your contract, so it cannot tell you whether an hour is overtime, only whether it is above the threshold you set. It does not handle rest days, bank holiday premiums, shift allowances, travel time or a rota that changes mid-week. It applies no rounding rule, because rounding to the nearest quarter hour is something a contract permits or does not, and applied silently it quietly shortens somebody’s week. And it keeps nothing: close the page and the week is gone, which is the point of a tool that promises not to send anything anywhere.

When the sheet is filled in by the gate instead

Every figure on this page was typed by somebody after the event, from memory or from a book in the cabin. That is the reason the arithmetic goes wrong, and it is the reason the week is argued about later. On a site running QR code clock-in the start and finish come from a scan at the poster, the time is written by the server rather than the handset, and the day line is already on the job at that person’s rate before anybody opens a spreadsheet on a Sunday. What an hour costs once the employer’s National Insurance and pension sit on top of it is on the employee cost calculator.

Not legal or payroll advice. The Working Time Regulations figures on this page are taken from the Working Time Regulations 1998 on legislation.gov.uk, regulations 4, 10 and 12, checked 7 September 2026. Overtime thresholds and rates are yours to set; the tool supplies none.