Why the ceiling on this page is yours
There is no federal maximum on the hours an adult employee can be asked to work. A sixty-hour week is not a violation of anything by virtue of being sixty hours. What federal law does, for employees who are non-exempt, is attach a premium to the hours past forty — the cost of a long week goes up, but the week is allowed. Rules for minors are different, and a handful of industries carry hours limits written for safety reasons rather than pay ones.
That leaves the ceiling as a personal instrument. Fifty is the default here because it is a common place for people to draw the line, not because it means anything. Set it to the number past which you would want to renegotiate, decline, or hire, and the projection rows will tell you what holding that line for a quarter looks like.
How to write a day
Each field takes a start and an end separated by a hyphen. Minutes are optional, so both 9-17 and 09:00-17:30 parse. An end earlier than the start is read as a shift that finishes the next day, which makes 22:00-06:30 eight and a half hours rather than a negative.
| Entry | Read as | Break applied | Worked |
|---|---|---|---|
| 09:00-18:00 | 9 hours on the clock | the default | 8.00 with a 60-minute default |
| 09:00-18:00/30 | 9 hours on the clock | 30 minutes, written in | 8.50 |
| 13:00-17:00 | 4 hours, under the six-hour line | none | 4.00 |
| 22:00-06:30 | crosses midnight | the default | 7.50 with a 60-minute default |
| (blank) | a day off | — | 0 |
The default break is applied only to days longer than six hours, on the reasoning that a short shift usually does not carry one. Where that is wrong for a particular day, write the break in after a slash and the default is ignored for that day.
Daily and weekly overtime are not added together
Leave the daily threshold blank and the count is purely weekly: everything past the weekly threshold is overtime. Fill it in and the page counts both ways and reports the larger, which is the ordinary treatment where a daily rule exists. It is not the sum of the two. Four ten-hour days is forty hours for the week and eight hours of daily overtime against an eight-hour daily threshold — the answer is eight, not forty-eight and not zero.
Whether a daily threshold applies to you at all is a state-level question, and states differ on it more than any other part of this subject. The field is blank by default so that nothing is assumed on your behalf.
Reading the projection without over-reading it
The last table repeats the week you entered across two weeks, four weeks, a quarter and a year. It is arithmetic, not a forecast — nobody works fifty-two identical weeks. Its use is comparative: a five-hour overage looks trivial in one week and reads differently as 260 hours over a year, which is six and a half full-time weeks of work that did not appear anywhere in the plan.
For a single repeating shift pattern rather than seven separate days, the work hours calculator is quicker. For the pay side with a double-time tier, use the overtime pay calculator. What a long week is worth in personal terms, rather than in payroll terms, is the subject of the hourly value calculator.
Questions people ask
The page name mentions 52 hours. Where does that come from?
The address is inherited from an earlier version of this page written for a jurisdiction that caps the working week at 52 hours by statute. No such cap exists in United States federal law, so the page was rebuilt around a ceiling you set yourself, and the default is 50 purely as a starting point. Nothing about the number 52 is carried over into the calculation.
How do I log a split shift?
Each field takes one span, so a genuinely split day needs a small workaround: enter the outer span and use the slash to write in the gap as break time. A shift from 07:00 to 11:00 and again from 16:00 to 20:00 can go in as 07:00-20:00/300, which is thirteen hours on the clock minus five hours of gap, giving the eight hours actually worked. The night-hours count will be slightly off for that day, since it assumes the gap sits inside the span rather than knowing where it falls.
Are the night hours paid at a higher rate?
Only if your employer pays a differential, which is a matter of policy or of a collective agreement rather than something that follows from the clock. The count is shown because shift work often does carry one and it is useful to know how many hours fall in the window, but nothing in the pay section applies a premium to them. If you receive a differential, the work hours calculator has a field for it.
Should I include on-call time?
It depends on how restricted you are, which is exactly the kind of judgement a calculator cannot make. Time where you must stay on the premises or remain so constrained that you cannot use it for your own purposes is generally treated as worked time; time where you carry a phone and are otherwise free generally is not, though answering a call turns that stretch into work. If your week includes a meaningful amount of on-call, log it both ways and look at the gap between the two totals before deciding which one to argue from.