Free Timesheet Template: Weekly and Biweekly Versions With Breaks, Overtime and Gross Pay, for Excel and Google Sheets

What the Template Includes

• Two tabs: a weekly sheet (Monday to Sunday) and a biweekly sheet (14 days), each with the same layout.
• Header fields for employee name, manager, pay period start and end dates, hourly rate and the weekly overtime threshold.
• Daily rows with start time, end time, unpaid break in minutes, a calculated hours-worked column and a notes column for job codes or explanations.
• Automatic calculations: daily hours in decimal form (8 hours 15 minutes shows as 8.25), period total, regular hours, overtime hours above the threshold, and gross pay at the regular rate plus time and a half for overtime.
• Overnight shift handling: an end time earlier than the start time is treated as the next day.
• Signature and approval lines for the employee and manager, and a note on the rules the formulas apply.

The formulas are unlocked so a payroll administrator can adjust the overtime threshold, change the multiplier to double time, or add a daily-overtime column for California, Alaska, Nevada or Colorado. For a browser-based version of the same calculation without a download, use our time card calculator.

How to Use the Timesheet Template

1. Download the file and save a master copy. Make one copy per employee per pay period, or one workbook per employee with a tab per period.
2. Fill in the header: name, manager, pay period dates, hourly rate and the overtime threshold (40 for federal rules; lower if your policy or contract sets it).
3. Enter times each day in 24-hour format (hh:mm). Record actual start and end times, not scheduled ones.
4. Enter unpaid break minutes for meal periods of 30 minutes or more during which the employee was fully relieved of duty. Do not deduct short rest breaks of 5 to 20 minutes; under federal law they are paid time.
5. Check the daily hours column. It converts the elapsed time to decimal hours automatically. A day showing 0.00 with times entered usually means a typo in the time format.
6. Review the totals. Regular hours are capped at the threshold; anything above is overtime at 1.5 times the rate. Adjust the multiplier if your policy pays more.
7. Sign and approve. The employee confirms the hours; the manager approves before the sheet goes to payroll. Keep the signed copy.

For Google Sheets, upload the .xlsx to Drive and open it with Sheets; the formulas convert without changes. For Numbers, open the file directly.

The Payroll Rules the Formulas Follow

Decimal hours. Payroll multiplies hours by a rate, so minutes must be converted to hundredths of an hour: 15 minutes is 0.25, 30 is 0.50, 45 is 0.75, and 20 minutes is 0.33. The template does this automatically; the most common manual timesheet error is writing 8.30 for eight and a half hours, which underpays by 12 minutes.

Unpaid breaks. Only bona fide meal periods, normally 30 minutes or more with the employee completely relieved of duty, may be deducted. Short rest breaks are compensable. Deducting a lunch that was worked through is the most common source of wage claims arising from timesheets; our guide to tracking employee breaks covers the rules.

Overtime per workweek. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires overtime at 1.5 times the regular rate for hours over 40 in a fixed workweek, and the weeks cannot be averaged, which is why the biweekly tab applies the threshold per week rather than at 80 for the period. The regular rate must include nondiscretionary bonuses and shift differentials; the template uses the base rate, so add those where they apply. Daily overtime in California, Alaska, Nevada and Colorado is not built in. Our guides to time and a half and overtime cover the calculation.

Rounding. The template records actual minutes. If your policy rounds to the nearest quarter hour, the Department of Labor's rule requires rounding that averages out over time (1 to 7 minutes down, 8 to 14 up). Several states now treat rounding sceptically where exact times are recorded; see timesheet rounding rules.

Exempt employees. Salaried employees who pass the FLSA exemption tests are not owed overtime and do not need FLSA hours records, though many employers track their time for project costing. The template's overtime calculation should be ignored for them. Our guide to exempt vs non-exempt employees explains the tests.

Record-Keeping Requirements

Federal rules require employers to keep, for each non-exempt employee, the hours worked each day and each workweek, the regular rate, straight-time and overtime earnings, deductions and the pay period dates. Time cards and the source documents they are built from must be kept for at least two years, and payroll records for at least three; several states require longer, and the statute of limitations for wage claims runs to three years for wilful violations. Signed timesheets, whether paper or exported PDF, satisfy the source-document requirement if they are complete and legible. Store them where they can be produced for an audit, and keep edits visible: a timesheet that has been altered after the employee signed it is a liability rather than a record.

The template is designed to produce that record for small teams and for roles where hours are genuinely known from a schedule or a clock. For definitions of the document itself and its variants, see what a timesheet is.

Where Spreadsheet Timesheets Stop Working

A spreadsheet timesheet is a record of what the employee or manager typed into it. That is adequate where hours are fixed and trusted. It becomes a problem in four situations that most growing teams reach.

• Reconstruction. Timesheets filled in on Friday for the whole week are built from memory, and memory compresses long tasks and drops short ones. The errors run in both directions and neither is defensible.
• Remote and hybrid work. Without a clock-in point, start and end times are estimates, and the question managers actually have, whether the hours were worked, is not answered by a cell that says 8:00.
• Fraud and padding. Rounded starts, forgotten breaks and the odd extra half hour are invisible in a spreadsheet and add up across a workforce; our guide to detecting false timesheets quantifies it.
• Scale. Fifty spreadsheets a fortnight, each reviewed, chased, corrected and keyed into payroll, is a part-time job that produces no analysis.

Automatic time tracking replaces the typed record with an observed one. E-Monitor's time tracking records when work starts, pauses and stops on each employee's computer, separates active from idle time, applies overtime and break rules per workweek, and produces the daily and weekly record the FLSA requires without anyone filling in a sheet, with payroll export at the end of the period. The template above is the right tool until that point; after it, the spreadsheet becomes the problem it was meant to solve.

Related reading: Biweekly vs Semi-Monthly Pay, Qualified Overtime Tracking, E-Monitor + Google Workspace.

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