Decimal hours converter
Convert hours and minutes to decimal hours and back, with payroll rounding and a whole pasted column converted at once.
- Runs in your browser
- Nothing you enter is sent
- Free, no account
Hours and minutes
7:45
Total minutes
465
useful for invoicing
Total seconds
27,900
As a share of a day
32.29%
of a 24-hour day
Formula and working
Hours and minutes to decimal
decimal = hours + minutes ÷ 60 = 7 + 45 ÷ 60 = 7.7500
Decimal back to minutes
minutes = (decimal − whole hours) × 60 = (7.7500 − 7) × 60 = 45 minutes = 7:45
Payroll rounding
rounded = round(decimal ÷ increment) × increment no rounding applied = 7.75
One minute is 0.01666… hours, so a decimal figure with two places is accurate to about 36 seconds. Timesheets that must reconcile to the minute should use four places.
Nothing pasted yet.
| Minutes | Decimal hours | Rounded (2dp) |
|---|---|---|
| :00 | 0.0000 | 0.00 |
| :05 | 0.0833 | 0.08 |
| :10 | 0.1667 | 0.17 |
| :15 | 0.2500 | 0.25 |
| :20 | 0.3333 | 0.33 |
| :25 | 0.4167 | 0.42 |
| :30 | 0.5000 | 0.50 |
| :35 | 0.5833 | 0.58 |
| :40 | 0.6667 | 0.67 |
| :45 | 0.7500 | 0.75 |
| :50 | 0.8333 | 0.83 |
| :55 | 0.9167 | 0.92 |
Assumptions
- Decimal hours are hours plus minutes divided by sixty. They are not the same as hours and minutes: 7.45 is seven hours and twenty-seven minutes, not seven hours forty-five.
- Payroll rounding is applied symmetrically — always to the nearest increment. Systems that always round down are unlawful in several jurisdictions, including under the US FLSA.
- Bulk mode reads each line independently and reverses the direction per line: anything containing a colon is treated as h:mm, anything else as a decimal.
- Negative durations are supported for corrections; write them with a leading minus, e.g. -0:15.
Why payroll insists on decimals
Pay is hours multiplied by a rate, and 7:45 × 22.00 is not an arithmetic
expression. Payroll systems therefore store time as a decimal number of hours: seven hours
forty-five minutes is 7.75.
The trap is that 7.45 also looks like a plausible way to write seven forty-five. It
is eighteen minutes short. Repeated across a five-day week that is an hour and a half of unpaid
work, and over a year it is more than a week's pay — which is why this is the single most
valuable conversion in timesheet handling.
The conversion
decimal hours = hours + minutes ÷ 60
minutes = (decimal − whole hours) × 60One minute is 1/60 of an hour, or 0.01666… — so a decimal figure rounded to two places is accurate to about thirty-six seconds. Two places is fine for payroll. Use four if a timesheet has to reconcile exactly to the minute.
Minutes to decimal, every five minutes
| Minutes | Decimal | Minutes | Decimal |
|---|---|---|---|
| :00 | 0.00 | :30 | 0.50 |
| :05 | 0.08 | :35 | 0.58 |
| :10 | 0.17 | :40 | 0.67 |
| :15 | 0.25 | :45 | 0.75 |
| :20 | 0.33 | :50 | 0.83 |
| :25 | 0.42 | :55 | 0.92 |
Four of these are exact — :15, :30, :45 and :00. The rest are recurring decimals, which is why totals built from twenty-minute increments never quite land on a round number.
Payroll rounding conventions
- Quarter hour (0.25) — the most common US payroll convention, sometimes called the 7-minute rule because the boundary falls at 7½ minutes either side.
- Tenth of an hour (0.1) — six-minute units. Standard in legal and professional services billing.
- Exact minutes — no rounding. Increasingly the default with digital clock-in systems, and always the safest.
Under the US Fair Labor Standards Act, rounding is permitted only if it is neutral: to the nearest increment, in both directions, over time averaging out in the employee's favour as often as against. A policy that always rounds down, or that rounds clock-ins forward and clock-outs back, is unlawful. This converter only ever rounds to the nearest increment.
Converting a whole column
Paste a column straight out of a spreadsheet and each line is converted independently, in whichever direction it needs: a line containing a colon is read as h:mm and returned as a decimal, a bare number is read as a decimal and returned as h:mm. The results copy back out as a column ready to paste into the next cell.
Negative values work too — write a correction as -0:15 — which matters when you are
adjusting a submitted timesheet rather than building one.
Spreadsheet gotcha
Excel and Google Sheets store a time as a fraction of a day, not an hour. A cell showing
7:45 holds 0.3229. To get decimal hours from a time-formatted cell, multiply by
24 — =A1*24 — and format the result as a plain number. Formatting alone will not do
it; the multiplication is the actual conversion.
Related conversions
If you are adding up shifts rather than converting a total, the hours calculator does the arithmetic and shows both formats per entry. For a full week with overtime rules and pay, use the time card calculator. For 24-hour to AM/PM notation, use the military time converter — that is clock time, which is a different thing from duration.
Runs on your device
No server, no upload, no analytics. The conversion, the bulk column and the exports are all JavaScript running in your browser, so a pasted timesheet stays exactly where you pasted it. The page works with the network switched off.
Questions
How do I convert minutes to decimal hours?
Divide the minutes by sixty. Fifteen minutes is 0.25, twenty is 0.333, forty-five is 0.75. The reference table on this page lists every five-minute step to four decimal places.
Why does payroll want decimal hours?
Because pay is hours multiplied by a rate, and multiplying by 7:45 is meaningless. Payroll systems store 7.75. Getting this wrong by writing 7.45 instead costs eighteen minutes of pay per shift.
What is quarter-hour rounding?
Rounding each entry to the nearest 0.25 of an hour, a common payroll convention. It must round to the nearest increment in both directions — always rounding down is unlawful in several jurisdictions, including under the US FLSA.
Can I convert a whole column from a spreadsheet?
Yes. Paste it into the bulk panel: any line containing a colon is read as h:mm and converted to decimal, any bare number is read as decimal and converted to h:mm, and the results copy back out as a column.