Calculating Weekly Pay From Clock-In and Clock-Out Times
Convert each day's clock-in and clock-out times to decimal hours, subtract any unpaid break time, sum the daily totals for the week, and multiply the result by the hourly rate — the most common error is forgetting to subtract an unpaid lunch break from each day's total before summing.
Turning a week of raw clock times into an accurate paycheck figure is simple arithmetic, but it's exactly the kind of simple arithmetic that's easy to get slightly wrong by hand across several days at once.
A worked day
Clocking in at 8:45 AM and out at 5:15 PM is 8.5 hours total. Subtracting a 30-minute unpaid lunch break brings the paid total to 8 hours for that day. Doing this correctly requires converting the clock times to decimal hours first (8:45 AM to 5:15 PM is 8 hours 30 minutes, or 8.5 in decimal) before subtracting the break, not after.
Summing a full week
Repeating that calculation for each day and summing the daily totals gives the week's total paid hours. At $22/hour with a week totaling 38 paid hours, gross pay for the week is 38 × $22 = $836 — straightforward once each day's hours are correctly converted and any breaks correctly subtracted.
Where this commonly goes wrong by hand
The most frequent manual error is forgetting to subtract an unpaid break on one or more days, which overstates total hours. A second common error is mixing up minutes and decimal hours (30 minutes is 0.5 hours, not 0.30) when converting clock times — an easy slip that compounds across a full week of entries.