Weekly work hours calculator

1. 1

   Take the start and end punch for a day. If the end is earlier than the start, the shift ran past midnight, so add 24 hours before subtracting.

2. 2

   Subtract the unpaid break. The break in a continuous shift only counts as working time when your collective agreement or contract says so. If it does not, it goes in that field.

3. 3

   Convert the day to decimal hours. Divide the minutes by 60: 7 hours 45 minutes becomes 7,75.

4. 4

   Add the seven days. The Workers' Statute sets the ordinary working week at 40 hours, averaged over the year, so the week is the unit you work with.

5. 5

   Split the total at 40. The first 40 hours are ordinary. Anything past that is overtime, either paid or compensated with rest.

Multiply each block by its rate and you have the gross week. The calculator above runs all five steps as you type, and shows each day's total so you can check a single shift.

The clock says 7:45. Payroll wants 7,75. The difference is not a rounding quirk: an hour has 60 minutes, and 45 of them are three quarters of an hour, which is 0,75. Writing 7,45 pays 7 hours and 27 minutes, so that shift loses 18 minutes without anyone noticing. Repeat it five days a week and the year comes up more than 70 hours short.

The fix is a division. Minutes divided by 60 give the decimal. Do it day by day before adding the week, never after, because a column of clock hours carries at 60 and a spreadsheet adding plain numbers does not.

Values are shown to two decimals. 5, 10, 20 and 50 minutes do not land on an exact hundredth of an hour, so payroll systems keep more precision inside than they print.

The Workers' Statute grants a rest of at least 15 minutes when a continuous daily shift runs longer than six hours. For workers under 18 the rest is 30 minutes and the continuous shift is measured from four and a half hours.

That rest is not paid by default. The same article says it counts as actual working time only when the collective agreement or the contract establishes it. That is why the coffee break sits inside the working day at some companies and outside it at others: both can be right, and what decides is the paperwork you signed.

The lunch break in a split shift is a different thing. There is no continuous shift there, the meal time sits outside working hours and is not paid. What never holds up is deducting a break during which you are still answering the phone or the counter: if you are available, it is working time.

In the calculator, put only the time your collective agreement leaves outside the working day in the break field. If a paid break goes in there, the week comes up short and so does the pay.

A daily record of working time has been compulsory for every employee since Royal Decree Law 8/2019, which added paragraph 9 to article 34 of the Workers' Statute. It has to show the specific start and end time of each working day, and the employer must keep it for four years and make it available to staff, their representatives and the labour inspectorate.

That leaves little room for automatic rounding. If the system shaves five minutes off every start, the record stops matching the real working day and the calculation drifts away from the hours worked. Rounding that cuts both ways and is written into the collective agreement is defensible; rounding that always falls the same way is not.

The same pattern repeats at :15, :30 and :45. The tool rounds the start punch and the end punch separately.

If in doubt, leave the tool on exact minutes and pay what the clock says. That is what an inspection will look at, and it is also what stops the weekly total from depending on a rule nobody wrote down.

Overtime is the hours worked beyond the ordinary working day, which the Workers' Statute sets at 40 hours a week averaged over the year. A collective agreement can set a shorter week, and the line moves down with it.

The rate is set by the collective agreement or the contract, with one clear floor: it can never be lower than the value of an ordinary hour. The alternative is compensating overtime with equivalent paid rest within the following four months. Where nothing is agreed, it is taken to be compensated with rest. The calculator applies the legal floor, so if your agreement pays a premium the real gross will be higher.

The cap is 80 overtime hours a year. Hours compensated with rest inside four months do not count towards it, and neither do hours worked to prevent or repair urgent damage. Overtime is also voluntary unless the collective agreement or the contract has agreed to it.

When the end time is earlier than the start time, subtracting one from the other gives a negative number. The calculator reads it as a shift crossing midnight and adds 24 hours before subtracting, so 22:00 to 06:00 comes out at 8 hours rather than minus 16. The day is flagged, so the assumption is visible instead of hidden.

Which week those hours land in is a separate question. The sensible answer is that they belong to the week in which they were worked, which for a shift straddling the cut can mean splitting it across two weeks. You can also count the whole shift in the week it started, as long as the criterion holds all year. Pick one and stay with it.

Whatever the criterion, the record has to stand up. The daily time record carries each person's start and end time, is kept for four years and has to be available to staff, their legal representatives and the labour inspectorate. Loose hours in a spreadsheet nobody signs do not meet that obligation.

• It applies the legal floor: 40 ordinary hours a week and overtime at the value of an ordinary hour. Your collective agreement can set a shorter week or a premium, and then the real figure changes.

• It assumes the rate you enter is the ordinary hourly rate. The real value includes the salary supplements that apply, which can raise the overtime rate.

• It shows gross pay. Income tax withholding and social security contributions come after this figure.

• It does not separate overtime that is paid from overtime compensated with rest. If you compensate it, the weekly gross does not rise and what grows is the pending rest balance.

• It covers one week. It does not track the 80 hour annual overtime cap or the minimum 12 hour rest between working days.

These results are estimates built on the legal floor of the Spanish Workers' Statute. Your collective agreement and your contract can improve on it, and usually do. This is not legal, tax or employment advice, and it does not replace a payroll professional.

Rules verified in September 2026.

Sources: Workers' Statute (Royal Legislative Decree 2/2015), articles 34, 35 and 37; Royal Decree Law 8/2019, which introduced the daily record of working time; Spain's 2026 minimum wage, 17.094 € gross a year. The decimal hour conversions are arithmetic, not survey data.