Free Timesheet Template

Three templates below, in the layouts most payroll periods use, plus the one thing most timesheet templates leave out: the fields the Fair Labor Standards Act actually requires you to keep, and how long you have to keep them.

Copy any of them into a spreadsheet. The formulas are given so you do not have to reverse engineer them, and there is a decimal conversion note at the end because that is where most manual timesheets go wrong.

What federal law actually requires

There is no legally required timesheet format. 29 CFR 516.2 sets out twelve items an employer must keep for every non-exempt employee, and it is explicit that no particular timekeeping system or record format is required. Paper, spreadsheet or software all satisfy it equally.

Only three of those twelve belong on the timesheet itself: hours worked each day, the total for the workweek, and enough identification to attach it to a person. The rest live in payroll. A timesheet template that tries to carry all twelve is a payroll register, and people stop filling it in.

One useful allowance in the same rule: for employees on a fixed schedule, you may keep the schedule itself plus a note confirming the employee followed it, and record actual hours only when they deviate. That is a legitimate shortcut for salaried non-exempt staff, and it is in the regulation rather than folklore.

Weekly timesheet template

The standard layout. One row per day, in and out times, unpaid break subtracted, total in decimal hours.

The hours formula, assuming In is column C, Out is column D and Break minutes are column E, with row 2 as the first day:

MOD is what handles a shift that crosses midnight. Without it, an 22:00 to 06:00 shift returns a negative number and the week silently under-reports. This is the single most common broken formula in a homemade timesheet.

Biweekly timesheet template

Biweekly pay periods are the most common in the US, and the mistake they invite is totaling eighty hours and calculating overtime on that total. Overtime under the FLSA is calculated per workweek, not per pay period. Fifty hours one week and thirty the next is ten hours of overtime, not zero.

So a biweekly sheet needs two separate weekly subtotals, never one.

Your workweek also has to be a fixed, recurring period of 168 hours, and 29 CFR 516.2 requires you to record when it starts. You can choose any start you like, but you cannot move it around to avoid overtime.

Monthly timesheet template

Monthly sheets suit salaried staff, contractors billing by the month, and project time. They are a poor fit for hourly non-exempt workers, because the weekly overtime line disappears and someone has to reconstruct it.

If you are tracking against projects rather than against a clock, the useful column is the one most templates omit: what the time was for. Hours without a task attached tell you the month was full and nothing else.

The column a California timesheet needs and most templates lack

The federal rule is weekly, so most templates carry one overtime line at 40 hours. In several states that is not enough, because overtime also accrues by the day and a weekly total cannot show it.

California is the clearest case. Per the California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement, non-exempt employees earn time and a half for hours over eight in a workday up to and including twelve, and double time beyond twelve. On the seventh consecutive day of a workweek the first eight hours are at time and a half, and anything beyond eight that day is at double time.

Work four ten hour days and you have forty hours for the week and eight hours of daily overtime. A template that only checks the weekly total reports zero. That is a real underpayment, and it is invisible in the sheet that produced it.

Alaska, Nevada and Colorado also have daily overtime thresholds with their own rules, so if you employ across state lines check each one rather than assuming the federal weekly test covers you. This is the most common reason a template that worked for years suddenly does not.

The rounding rule most templates get wrong

Rounding clock times is legal, and it is narrower than the version that circulates as the "seven minute rule". 29 CFR 785.48 says the long-standing practice of recording start and stop times to the nearest 5 minutes, or the nearest tenth or quarter of an hour, is acceptable provided it is used in a way that will not, over a period of time, fail to compensate employees properly for all the time they actually worked.

Two things follow, and both get missed.

• Rounding must be neutral. It has to round both ways. A rule that always rounds a late clock-in down and an early clock-out up is not rounding, it is a deduction.
• It has to come out even over time. The test is not whether any single entry was fair. It is whether the practice, across a period, paid people for the hours they worked.

The same regulation adds that time clocks are not required at all, and that major discrepancies between clock records and actual hours worked should be discouraged because they cast doubt on the accuracy of the records.

The safest choice for a spreadsheet is not to round. Compute in decimal to two places and let the arithmetic be exact. Rounding was a convenience for punch cards, and a spreadsheet has no reason to inherit it.

Minutes to decimal, the part people get wrong by hand

Payroll wants decimal hours. A clock gives you minutes. Seven hours and thirty minutes is 7.50, which everyone gets right, and seven hours and twenty minutes is 7.33, which many people write as 7.20.

The conversion is minutes divided by 60. In a spreadsheet the subtraction of two times already returns a fraction of a day, so multiplying by 24 gives decimal hours directly and no manual conversion is needed. Our timesheet conversion chart has every minute from 1 to 59 if you are converting by hand.

Over a fortnight, treating :20 as .20 costs an employee roughly seven minutes per occurrence. It is small, systematic, and exactly the kind of error a Department of Labor investigator finds quickly because it only ever runs one way.

If you would rather build the sheet yourself than copy a layout, our guide to the Excel and Google Sheets timesheet has every formula, including the one that stops an overnight shift going negative, and the cell formatting that silently breaks weekly totals.

Which of these rules apply at all depends on whether the employee is exempt or non-exempt, a distinction decided by three tests rather than by job title.

How long to keep them

Two different clocks, which is why this gets muddled.

So the timesheet itself is a two year record under 29 CFR 516.6, while the payroll it feeds is a three year record under 29 CFR 516.5. State law frequently requires longer, and where it does the longer period governs. Keeping everything for four years is simpler than tracking two clocks and cheap in a spreadsheet.

Some industries need more than these layouts hold. Construction in particular has to carry cost codes, worker classification and a weekly certified payroll on public work, which our construction timesheet guide sets out.

To check a specific week rather than build a sheet, our overtime calculator derives the regular rate the way the regulation requires, including any bonus paid that week.

When a spreadsheet stops being the right answer

A template works well up to roughly a dozen people on similar schedules. Past that the failure is not the spreadsheet, it is the collection: chasing submissions, reconciling versions, and finding out on payroll day that three sheets are missing.

The signals that you have outgrown it are specific. Someone spends more than an hour per pay period assembling sheets. Corrections arrive after payroll has run. You cannot answer how many hours went to a given project without opening every file. Or you have staff in more than one state and the rules have stopped being the same.

At that point the options are a dedicated time tracking tool or an automated feed, which we cover in timesheet automation. If the reason you are looking is that you suspect hours are being reported loosely, read time tracking for remote employees first, because tooling chosen in that frame tends to solve the wrong problem.

Key takeaways

• There is no legally required timesheet format. 29 CFR 516.2 lists twelve records to keep and explicitly requires no particular system.
• Only three of the twelve belong on the sheet itself: daily hours, the weekly total, and who it belongs to.
• Use MOD for overnight shifts. Without it a shift crossing midnight returns a negative number and the week under-reports.
• Overtime is calculated per workweek, never per pay period, so a biweekly sheet needs two separate weekly subtotals.
• Rounding is legal to the nearest 5 minutes, tenth or quarter hour, but only if it is neutral and comes out even over time.
• Minutes convert to decimal by dividing by 60. Twenty minutes is 0.33, not 0.20, and the error only ever runs one way.
• California and three other states have daily overtime thresholds, so a template that tests only the weekly total can report zero overtime on a week that owes eight hours.
• Time cards are a two year record, payroll a three year record. Keeping everything four years is simpler than tracking both.