Free Weekly Timesheet Template (Excel) — With Overtime

Most free timesheet templates break at midnight.

They subtract the start time from the end time, which works perfectly until someone clocks in at 22:00 and out at 06:00 — at which point the formula returns minus 16 hours. Some sheets show a negative, some show #####, and some quietly show zero. All three under-pay somebody.

This one uses MOD to wrap the calculation past midnight, so a night shift reads as 8 hours like it should.

How the hours formula works

The important cell is the one people usually get wrong:

=IF(OR(C4="",D4=""),0,MOD(D4-C4,1)*24-E4)

Three things are happening.

MOD(D4-C4,1) takes the difference between end and start and wraps it into a single day. For a normal shift it changes nothing. For 22:00 to 06:00 it turns -0.667 into 0.333, which is the 8 hours that actually happened.

*24 converts Excel's fraction-of-a-day into hours. Excel stores 06:00 as 0.25, not as 6.

-E4 removes the unpaid break, entered in hours rather than minutes so it subtracts cleanly.

The IF at the front stops empty rows showing a spurious zero-hour shift.

Filling it in

1. Enter the hourly rate once, in the cell below the table. Every pay figure references it, so a rate change updates the week.
2. Enter start and end times as HH:MM. Excel understands 9:00 and 17:30.
3. Enter the unpaid break in hours — 0.5 for thirty minutes, not 30.
4. Read the totals. Nothing else needs touching.

The grey columns are calculated. Typing into them replaces the formula, which is how most template spreadsheets die within a month.

Overtime: total the week, then split it

The template totals the week rather than flagging overtime per day, because that is how the federal rule works. Under the FLSA, overtime is owed on hours over 40 in a workweek, at not less than one and a half times the regular rate.

Two things to watch:

Daily overtime exists in some states. California requires overtime after 8 hours in a day and double time after 12, regardless of the weekly total. Alaska, Nevada and Colorado have their own daily rules. If you are in one of those, weekly totalling alone will under-pay.

The "regular rate" is not always the hourly rate. Non-discretionary bonuses and shift differentials have to be folded in before the multiplier applies. If you pay either, the number in this sheet is a starting point rather than the final figure.

The overtime pay calculator will work a single week through, and the timesheet calculator does the same thing as this template in the browser if you would rather not download anything.

Breaks, and which ones you pay for

The federal position is broadly this:

• Short breaks, roughly 20 minutes or less, generally count as hours worked and are paid.
• Bona fide meal periods, usually 30 minutes or more where the employee is fully relieved of duty, are generally unpaid.
• An employee who eats at their desk while still covering the phones is working, whatever the schedule calls it.

That last one is where most disputes start. A "lunch break" that is routinely interrupted is not a meal period, and deducting it anyway is a wage claim waiting to happen.

Several states add their own requirements on top — mandatory meal periods after a set number of hours, paid rest breaks, or penalties for missed breaks. The template deducts only what you type into the break column, deliberately, because the rule you need to apply is local.

Recordkeeping

Timesheets are not just an internal convenience. Federal recordkeeping rules require:

• Three years for payroll records, collective agreements and sales records
• Two years for the records used to compute wages — including the timesheets themselves, schedules, and any record of additions to or deductions from wages

Several states require longer. In a wage dispute, the absence of records is generally not neutral: where an employer has failed to keep adequate records, the employee's reasonable estimate of hours tends to carry the day.

A folder of weekly spreadsheets satisfies this, provided the folder still exists in three years and nobody has overwritten last month's file. That is a real risk with a template like this one, and it is the honest argument for moving off spreadsheets eventually.

When a weekly sheet stops working

A single-week timesheet is genuinely the right tool for one person, or for a handful of people whose hours barely change.

It starts costing more than it saves when:

1. You are copying the file every Monday and renaming it, so the year lives in 52 separate documents.
2. You need to know how many hours someone worked last quarter and have to open twelve files to find out.
3. Someone edits a past week and nobody notices.
4. You need the hours to talk to leave — because time off and time worked are the same calendar, tracked in two places that disagree.

That fourth point is the one that bites teams rather than individuals. A timesheet knows who was working; it has no idea who was approved to be away. When the two disagree, payroll is wrong and nobody finds out until someone complains.

Related templates

If you are setting up records for a small team, these usually go together:

• The PTO tracking spreadsheet for leave balances
• The employee attendance tracker for a month-at-a-glance view of who was in
• The shift schedule template if you are rostering rather than tracking fixed hours

And when the spreadsheets stop keeping up, importing what you already have is a shorter step than starting again — your existing sheet becomes a working team, with everyone's details intact.