Practical guides on payroll hour math, Excel formulas that actually save time, and honest reviews of time tracking tools. Written for the HR manager doing payroll in a spreadsheet, the freelancer who just got a W-9 wrong, and the small business owner who can't afford a payroll error.
Converting 7:30 to 7.5 sounds trivial. Get it wrong across a full payroll run and you're looking at real legal exposure. This guide covers the conversion formula, how FLSA rounding actually works, and worked examples for weekly, biweekly, and monthly pay periods.
Read the Full Guide →The short version: instead of writing 1 hour 30 minutes as 1:30, you write it as 1.5. That's decimal time, also called decimal hours. The reason payroll uses this format is that you can't multiply 7:30 by a wage rate and get a correct answer. But you can multiply 7.5 by $18/hour and immediately get $135. One format works with basic math; the other doesn't.
The FLSA, passed by Congress in 1938 and enforced today by the DOL's Wage and Hour Division, sets the rules for what employers must track and pay. And it's broader than most people expect. Under DOL Fact Sheet #22 and 29 CFR Part 785, employers owe wages not just for scheduled hours but for any time an employee is "suffered or permitted" to work, including work they didn't authorize or even know about. That scope means the conversion math isn't optional. Small rounding errors repeated across a team over several months add up to real back-pay liability, and regulators have been actively collecting.
The guides here cover the math, the spreadsheet formulas (Excel and Google Sheets both), FLSA rounding rules with real examples, and a comparison of the apps that handle all of this automatically: Clockify, Toggl Track, Harvest, and Gusto, among others.
Five formulas you can copy into a spreadsheet right now. Covers converting standard HH:MM entries, handling text-formatted times that break SUM, totaling a full work week, and flagging anything over 40 hours for overtime. Tested in both Excel and Google Sheets.
We looked at 7 apps that can export decimal hours without you doing the conversion yourself, from Clockify's free tier to full payroll platforms like Gusto. For each one we checked pricing, what the decimal export actually looks like, whether FLSA rounding is handled before export, and which type of user the tool is really built for.
"Decimal time" means two different things depending on context. There's the payroll version you use every day (1.5 hours, 2.75 hours). Then there's the French Revolutionary decimal time system that tried to divide the whole day into 10 hours of 100 minutes each. That one didn't last. This guide explains both, and why the payroll version became the standard.
Quick-reference pages to bookmark alongside the guides.
Plain-English definitions of 60+ terms: decimal hours, compensable time, FLSA, FICA, FTE, billable hours, and more.
Browse Glossary →50+ abbreviations explained: OT, YTD, PTO, FICA, FLSA, FUTA, HRIS, FTE, and every other acronym on your pay stub or HR form.
View Acronyms →Every guide here gets checked against primary sources: DOL Fact Sheets, IRS Publication 15 (the Employer's Tax Guide, updated every year), and the official documentation for each software tool we review. Nobody pays to be listed or ranked. Tool rankings come from actual testing, specifically whether the decimal export works correctly, whether FLSA rounding is handled before export, and whether the tool fits into a real payroll workflow rather than just a demo one.
We do earn affiliate commissions if you sign up for a tool through our links. That's disclosed on our affiliate page. It doesn't change what we recommend or how we score things, but you should know it's there.
The questions we get most often.
In decimal time, 1 hour 45 minutes becomes 1.75. That's it. The whole number is the hours; the decimal is the fraction of an hour (45 minutes divided by 60 gives you 0.75). The reason this matters for payroll is that standard HH:MM format runs on base 60, which means you can't just multiply it by a wage rate and get a right answer. Decimal format is base 10, so the math works directly: hours times rate equals pay.
Because the math breaks otherwise. Take an employee who worked 7 hours and 30 minutes at $20/hour. If you type 7.30 into a calculator and multiply by 20, you get $146. The correct decimal is 7.5, which gives $150. That's a $4 error on one day for one person. Multiply that across a team over a month and you've got a real underpayment problem. The DOL does allow rounding to the nearest quarter-hour under specific FLSA conditions, but you still have to convert to decimal first before any multiplication makes sense.
Divide the minutes by 60. That's the whole formula. If someone worked 2 hours and 20 minutes: 20 divided by 60 is 0.3333, so the total is 2.33 decimal hours. In Excel or Google Sheets there's a faster way: if your time is stored as an actual time value (not typed as plain text), multiply the cell by 24. Excel stores time internally as a fraction of a 24-hour day, so multiplying by 24 converts it straight to decimal hours. Our Excel formula guide has the exact syntax for both cases.
Under 29 CFR § 785.48, the DOL allows three rounding increments: nearest 5 minutes, nearest one-tenth of an hour (0.1), or nearest quarter-hour (0.25). The rule is that rounding only stays legal if it genuinely averages out and doesn't consistently shortchange employees. Always round down and you're in violation. In 2025, one contractor paid out $594,143 in back wages and damages partly because its timekeeping and rounding practices were systematically cutting employee pay. It's also worth knowing about the 2023 Eighth Circuit case, Houston v. St. Luke's Health Systems, where a court found that a rounding policy can still violate the FLSA even if it looks neutral on paper, as long as the real outcome data show it favors the employer. Rounding is a tool, not a guarantee. Our payroll hours guide walks through all three methods with worked examples.
Clockify, Toggl Track, Harvest, and Timely all export decimal hours in CSV and PDF reports. Gusto isn't really a standalone tracker; it's a full payroll platform that processes hours in decimal format as part of running payroll. QuickBooks Time (formerly TSheets) lets you export in both HH:MM and decimal. The thing actually worth checking before you pick any of these: does the app apply FLSA rounding before the export? If it does, you skip a manual conversion step entirely. Our app comparison breaks this down for each tool.
Yes. The calculator, all four guides, the glossary, and the acronyms reference are all free with no login and no paywall. We make money through affiliate commissions when someone signs up for a time tracking app through one of our links. The affiliate disclosure page explains how that works if you want the details.
Every formula in these guides starts with a decimal hour value. If you need to convert a time right now, the calculator on the homepage does it instantly, no login, no download needed.
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