A decimal hours converter turns time written as hours and minutes into a plain decimal number and back. Divide the minutes by 60 to get the fraction: 7 hours 45 minutes is 7 + 45/60 = 7.75 decimal hours. Payroll systems multiply decimal hours by an hourly rate, so timesheet totals are usually reported this way.
How to convert hours and minutes to decimal
- Keep the whole hours as they are — the 7 in 7:45 stays 7.
- Divide the minutes by 60: 45 ÷ 60 = 0.75.
- Round to two decimal places if the minutes don't divide evenly: 8:20 → 20 ÷ 60 = 0.3333… → 0.33.
- Add the two parts back together: 7 + 0.75 = 7.75 decimal hours.
Going the other direction is one multiplication: take the part after the decimal point and multiply it by 60. 6.4 hours → 0.4 × 60 = 24 minutes, so 6.4 hours is 6:24. If you're totaling a whole week of punches before converting, the time card by hand guide walks through the full routine.
How the math works
Clock time and decimal time count the same thing on two different bases. The clock is base-60: each hour splits into 60 minutes, so "30 past" means 30 sixtieths of an hour. Decimal notation is base-10: the digits after the point are tenths and hundredths of an hour. Converting between them is just changing the denominator — minutes ÷ 60 turns sixtieths into a base-10 fraction, and fraction × 60 turns it back.
Most minute values produce repeating decimals. Ten minutes is 10 ÷ 60 = 0.16666…, which two-decimal notation writes as 0.17. Only minutes divisible by 3 come out exact at two places (12 min = 0.20, 36 min = 0.60, 45 min = 0.75). That's why a converted figure occasionally reverses to a minute off if you round too early — more on that under rounding below.
Worked example
Suppose your week totals 38 hours 50 minutes at $22.00 per hour. In minutes that's 38 × 60 + 50 = 2,330 minutes, and 2,330 ÷ 60 = 38.8333… hours. Paying on the exact figure gives 38.8333 × 22 = $854.33 gross. Paying on the two-decimal figure of 38.83 gives 38.83 × 22 = $854.26 — seven cents lower, because rounding trimmed a third of a hundredth of an hour (12 seconds) off the week. Tiny either way, but it shows why the order of operations matters: total the raw minutes first, then convert to decimal once at the end.
Why payroll uses decimal hours
Pay is a multiplication — hours worked × hourly rate — and multiplication only works on decimal numbers. You can't multiply 8:30 by $18 directly, because the ":30" is thirty sixtieths, not thirty hundredths. Payroll software, spreadsheets, and accounting ledgers therefore store worked time as a decimal so every downstream calculation (gross pay, overtime premiums, job costing, invoicing) is plain arithmetic.
The conversion is also where the classic timesheet mistake lives: typing 8:30 into a pay calculation as 8.30. Those are different amounts of time — 8.30 decimal hours is 8 hours 18 minutes (0.30 × 60 = 18), so the entry is short by 12 minutes. Across a five-day week that's a full hour of unrecorded time. If a converted figure looks slightly off, check whether a colon quietly became a decimal point somewhere. The time card calculator sidesteps the issue entirely by accepting clock punches and doing the conversion internally.
Rounding to two decimal places
Two decimals is the de facto payroll standard because one hundredth of an hour is 36 seconds — finer resolution than any pay policy needs. Rounding a single entry to two places moves it by at most 18 seconds, which at $20 per hour is a tenth of a cent. The error only becomes visible if you let it stack: converting each day to a rounded decimal and then summing five rounded figures can drift a week by up to a minute and a half. The clean habit is the one from the worked example — keep everything in whole minutes while you add, and convert to decimal exactly once.
Decimal rounding is not the same thing as punch rounding. Punch rounding changes the recorded clock-in and clock-out times themselves — typically to the nearest quarter hour under the federal recording-practices regulation (29 CFR 785.48) — and can shift a day's total by several minutes in either direction. If your employer rounds punches, see the 7-minute rule guide and the rounding policies guide, or test a specific punch in the timesheet rounding calculator. Decimal rounding happens after all of that, purely as a display format.
Minutes-to-decimal conversion chart (1–60)
Every minute from 1 to 60 with its decimal-hour equivalent, rounded to two places. Read it in column pairs: find the minutes, take the decimal next to it, and add it to your whole hours — 5 hours 23 minutes → 0.38 → 5.38. To print just this chart, use your browser's print function; the page's print layout keeps the chart and drops everything else.
| Min | Decimal | Min | Decimal | Min | Decimal | Min | Decimal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0.02 | 16 | 0.27 | 31 | 0.52 | 46 | 0.77 |
| 2 | 0.03 | 17 | 0.28 | 32 | 0.53 | 47 | 0.78 |
| 3 | 0.05 | 18 | 0.30 | 33 | 0.55 | 48 | 0.80 |
| 4 | 0.07 | 19 | 0.32 | 34 | 0.57 | 49 | 0.82 |
| 5 | 0.08 | 20 | 0.33 | 35 | 0.58 | 50 | 0.83 |
| 6 | 0.10 | 21 | 0.35 | 36 | 0.60 | 51 | 0.85 |
| 7 | 0.12 | 22 | 0.37 | 37 | 0.62 | 52 | 0.87 |
| 8 | 0.13 | 23 | 0.38 | 38 | 0.63 | 53 | 0.88 |
| 9 | 0.15 | 24 | 0.40 | 39 | 0.65 | 54 | 0.90 |
| 10 | 0.17 | 25 | 0.42 | 40 | 0.67 | 55 | 0.92 |
| 11 | 0.18 | 26 | 0.43 | 41 | 0.68 | 56 | 0.93 |
| 12 | 0.20 | 27 | 0.45 | 42 | 0.70 | 57 | 0.95 |
| 13 | 0.22 | 28 | 0.47 | 43 | 0.72 | 58 | 0.97 |
| 14 | 0.23 | 29 | 0.48 | 44 | 0.73 | 59 | 0.98 |
| 15 | 0.25 | 30 | 0.50 | 45 | 0.75 | 60 | 1.00 |
Frequently asked questions
Is 7.5 hours the same as 7 hours 30 minutes?
Yes. The .5 means half an hour: 0.5 × 60 = 30 minutes. It is not 7 hours 50 minutes — that would be 7.83 decimal hours.
How do I convert decimal hours back to hours and minutes?
Multiply the part after the decimal point by 60. For 9.85 hours: 0.85 × 60 = 51, so 9.85 hours is 9:51. The converter above does this automatically when you type in the decimal field.
How do I convert h:mm to decimal in Excel or Google Sheets?
If the cell holds a real time value (entered as 7:45), multiply it
by 24 and format the result as a number: =A1*24. Spreadsheets
store times as fractions of a 24-hour day, so multiplying by 24 yields hours.
Should I round each day or only the weekly total?
Total first, round once. Add the week up in whole minutes (or exact h:mm), then divide by 60 at the end. Rounding every day to two decimals before summing lets small errors accumulate — harmless in most weeks, but pointless when the one-conversion route is just as easy.
Does this work for clock times like 17:30?
This tool converts durations — amounts of time, not points on the clock. To translate a clock reading between 12-hour and 24-hour formats, use the military time converter; to get the duration between two clock times, use the hours calculator and it will hand you the decimal automatically.
Is anything I type stored or sent anywhere?
No — the conversion runs entirely in your browser and nothing is transmitted.