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About Time Cards
Hours worked from a shift, with breaks and overtime.
Federal law sets the floor for overtime and record-keeping, but state rules can be stricter and a handful of states require daily overtime past eight hours. Salaried employees are exempt only when their duties and pay meet the Department of Labor tests.
American payroll law sets a 40-hour week, requires 1.5 times the regular rate beyond it for non-exempt employees, and does not require paid breaks or a lunch. Employers may round punch times, and an unpaid meal break is the commonest reason a time card totals less than the hours spent at work.
A time card records punches, and the arithmetic between them decides pay: rounding must be neutral over time, a break is unpaid only when genuinely free of duties, and overtime is calculated on the week rather than the pay period.
A 30-minute unpaid lunch, five days a week, is two and a half hours — about 6% of a 40-hour week that never reaches the paycheque.
Record-keeping is the obligation behind the arithmetic: employers must keep accurate hours for non-exempt staff, and rounding practices must not systematically shave time. Averaging across a pay period cannot be used to avoid overtime earned within a given week.
Time Card Calculator sits with the rest of the library's everyday work, and it rests on the same timekeeping arithmetic the way a manufacturer's label or a timetable does. Its answer is only as good as the assumptions standing behind it.
The quantities it works from — clock in, clock out, unpaid break and hourly rate — are the ones a real timekeeping question actually turns on, and each carries a convention of its own, set out below.
Everyday arithmetic in the United States carries conventions that are easy to miss: dates run month before day, distances and weights follow customary units, and prices are quoted before tax. Those conventions make a surprising share of daily sums come out differently from the same question asked elsewhere.
The figures in this section follow American practice unless the subject itself is international.