Decimal Hours Converter
Turn hours and minutes into a single decimal number — the format payroll and timesheets expect.
Built for timesheets
Decimal hours are what most payroll and time-tracking systems multiply by an hourly rate — 8 h 30 m becomes a clean 8.5.
Two views at once
See the same duration as decimal hours and as a total minute count, so you can use whichever your form asks for.
What are decimal hours?
Minutes as a fraction of an hour
Decimal hours express a duration as one number, with the minutes written as a fraction of an hour rather than out of sixty. Eight hours and thirty minutes is 8.5 decimal hours, because thirty minutes is half an hour. This is the format payroll software, billing tools, and spreadsheets expect, since you can multiply a decimal-hour figure straight by an hourly rate — something the "8:30" clock format does not allow.
Keep the whole hours as they are, divide the minutes by 60 to turn them into a fraction of an hour, and add the two together.
Decimal hours = hours + minutes ÷ 60The total minute count is the same duration measured purely in minutes: multiply the hours by 60 and add the minutes, so 8 h 30 m is 510 minutes. Both outputs describe one duration — pick whichever your timesheet or invoice asks for.
Suppose a shift lasts 8 hours and 30 minutes.
Convert the minutes
30 ÷ 60 = 0.5 of an hour.Add the whole hours
8 + 0.5 = 8.5 decimal hours.Or count every minute
8 × 60 + 30 = 510 total minutes.
Decimal hours are most useful where time gets multiplied — payroll and timesheets, where 8.5 hours at an hourly rate is a single calculation. A few fractions are worth memorising: 15 minutes is 0.25 of an hour, 30 minutes is 0.5, and 45 minutes is 0.75. Anything in between follows the same rule — minutes divided by 60 — so 20 minutes is roughly 0.33 and 10 minutes is about 0.17. The total-minutes figure is handy when a system tracks effort in plain minutes rather than hours.
The conversion is exact, but a couple of conventions are worth keeping in mind.
Minutes run 0 to 59
Minutes are part of a single hour, so they belong in the range 0 to 59 — 75 minutes is one hour and fifteen minutes, entered as 1 hour and 15 minutes. The converter also rounds decimal hours to four places, which is far finer than any timesheet needs but means a value such as 1.3333 is a rounded view of exactly one hour and twenty minutes.