Adding up a week of work hours by hand is slow, error-prone work, especially when shifts differ, breaks vary, and one shift crosses midnight. A small slip, a forgotten half-hour break or a misread clock time, quietly changes the weekly total, and that total decides overtime, pay checks and whether a contract limit was crossed. This calculator does the arithmetic for you: enter each day as start, end and break, and it returns the hours per day, the weekly total, and the overtime above your threshold.
This calculator needs your days in a simple format: one per line, as day, start time, end time, and break in hours, separated by commas, using a 24-hour clock. It also needs your overtime threshold, usually forty hours a week, but you can set any number your contract uses. It subtracts the break from each shift, adds the days, and reports anything above the threshold as overtime. There is no account and nothing to install; the maths runs in your browser.
Here is a worked example. Five days, each from 09:00 to 17:00 with a half-hour break, give 7.5 hours per day. Five days at 7.5 hours is 37.5 hours for the week, which is below a forty-hour threshold, so overtime is zero. Add a Saturday shift from 09:00 to 13:00 with no break, four more hours, and the week becomes 41.5 hours, with 1.5 hours of overtime. Seeing the daily breakdown makes the jump obvious: the overtime came entirely from Saturday, not from the weekday shifts.
Midnight crossings and breaks cause most manual errors, and the tool handles both. A night shift from 22:00 to 06:00 is eight hours before breaks, not a negative number, because the calculator wraps past midnight automatically. A one-hour unpaid lunch is subtracted in full, while a paid fifteen-minute break should be entered as zero, because it is still paid time. Getting breaks right matters more than most people think: a half-hour break across five days is two and a half hours a week, which is often the difference between overtime and no overtime.
Hours are only half the story, and this tool is honest about that limit. It counts hours; it does not calculate pay, and it does not decide what counts as legal overtime. Some contracts pay overtime daily after eight hours, others only weekly after forty, some pay night and weekend rates, and some exclude certain breaks or on-call time entirely. Always compare the tool total with your contract and your payslip: if they disagree, the contract and the payslip rule, and the difference usually hides in how breaks or weekend hours are treated.
Keeping a weekly record protects you in ways a single total cannot. If a payslip looks short, a day-by-day record shows exactly which day differs, which is far stronger than a vague feeling that the week was long. If a manager asks you to stay late, the record shows how that extra time pushes the week toward the threshold. Save each week output or copy it into a notebook, and keep the same format week after week, so any week can be compared with any other without re-doing the arithmetic.
Use this calculator every week, especially if your shifts change. It takes a minute to paste a week of times, and it replaces mental arithmetic with a clean daily and weekly breakdown you can trust and check. Remember its limits: it counts hours from the times you enter, it assumes breaks are unpaid, and it cannot interpret your contract or your local labour law. For hours, though, it is exact, and exact hours are the foundation of fair pay, honest overtime, and a work week you can actually account for. That accountability runs both ways: it protects your pay when hours are questioned, and it shows your employer a clean, checkable record instead of a dispute.