Time Card Calculator — Hours Between Times
The single-shift view: two clock times and an optional break, answering "how many hours is 9 to 5:30 with a half-hour lunch?" (8 hours) without filling in a whole week. It handles overnight spans automatically, so 22:00 to 06:00 reads as 8 hours rather than a negative number — the quick check for an invoice line, a shift estimate, or a timesheet correction.
Time card & work hours
Paid hours
8 hrs
09:00 to 17:30 minus a 30-minute break
Hours are plain arithmetic on the times you enter; overtime uses the standard federal 40-hour week at time-and-a-half. Some states and contracts use daily overtime or other rules, so treat pay totals as an estimate — not payroll or legal advice.
The quick single-span check
The math is end minus start minus break, converted to decimal hours: 9:00 to 17:30 is 8.5 elapsed hours, minus a 30-minute break is 8 paid hours. Decimal output matters because invoices and payroll multiply hours by a rate — 7 hours 45 minutes must enter that multiplication as 7.75, and the calculator hands you the number already converted.
Overnight handling is the difference between this and naive subtraction: an end time before the start time adds 24 hours, so night shifts, bar closes, and red-eye security rotations come out right. Spans longer than 24 hours are the one thing it cannot represent — split those into two entries.
Questions
- How many hours is 9:00 to 17:30 with a 30-minute break?
- 8 paid hours — 8.5 elapsed minus the half-hour break, already in the decimal form payroll and invoicing math expects.
- What does a negative-looking span mean?
- An end time earlier than the start is treated as an overnight shift: 22:00 to 06:00 is 8 hours, not −16. The assumption is a single shift of less than 24 hours.