Billable hours calculator

Calculate billable hours from a list of times. Enter how long you worked and choose how to round, and the calculator shows your billable hours and the amount to invoice. It runs in your browser, so nothing you type is sent or stored.

By Aleksandr Ulanov

How the calculator works

Billable hours times your hourly rate is the amount to invoice. The calculator rounds before it multiplies. With each entry, every billable time is rounded on its own and the results are added up. With the total, the exact minutes are added up first and rounded once. Rounding each entry up always gives as many hours as rounding the total up, or more, because every entry can only gain time.

Hours show with two decimals, the way an invoice line shows them, and the amount is those hours times your rate. That holds for exact minutes too: 139 minutes show as 2.32 h and bill $208.80, while 139 ÷ 60 × 90 would be $208.50. Non-billable times count toward your tracked time and leave the amount alone.

The example above has three billable times (0:50, 1:22 and 0:07) at $90 an hour, plus 0:30 that isn't billable. In exact minutes that's 2.32 h, or $208.80. In 6-minute increments rounded up, each entry gives 2.50 h ($225.00) and the total gives 2.40 h ($216.00). In 15-minute increments rounded to the nearest, each entry gives 2.00 h ($180.00).

Billing increments: 6, 15 or 30 minutes

Six minutes are one tenth of an hour, so billing in 6-minute increments means billing in tenths. That's a convention, common in legal work, and no general law requires it. One place where it is written down: the U.S. Trustee Program's guidelines for fee applications in U.S. bankruptcy cases say “Time entries should be kept contemporaneously with the services rendered in time periods of tenths of an hour” (28 C.F.R. Part 58, Appendix A). That rule covers those fee applications only.

Consultants and freelancers often bill in 15 or 30 minutes instead. Whichever you use, agree the increment with your client before you bill, including whether you round each entry or the total, and write it into your proposal or contract.

Billable and non-billable time

Billable time is the work you can charge a client for under your agreement. Non-billable time is the rest, such as admin and internal meetings. The calculator's billable share divides your billable minutes by all the minutes you entered, before rounding, so it describes the time you tracked. We don't quote an industry average for it, because we haven't found one from a primary source. Our guide to billable hours covers what usually counts as billable and how the hours become an invoice.

Rounding employees' hours is a different question

This part is about paying employees in the United States. U.S. federal wage rules describe the practice of recording employees' start and stop times “to the nearest 5 minutes, or to the nearest one-tenth or quarter of an hour”. For enforcement, the practice is accepted “provided that it is used in such a manner that it will not result, over a period of time, in failure to compensate the employees properly for all the time they have actually worked” (29 C.F.R. § 785.48(b)). What you bill a client follows your agreement with that client. This page is not legal advice.

From hours to an invoice

In Clockaroo, you track time with a timer or a week timesheet, in minutes, and mark each entry billable or not. Clockaroo bills exact minutes, with no rounding increment. When you make an invoice from unbilled hours, each invoice line adds up the minutes of its time entries and shows them as hours with two decimals, rounded half up. The line amount is those hours times your rate: for the example above, 2.32 h and $208.80. If you agreed 6- or 15-minute increments with a client, the app has no setting for that today.

Invoicing in the app works for businesses in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Ireland and the United States. Track the time and turn it into an invoice with a free account. For a team, Team costs $9 per person a month: one price per person, with no usage fees.

Tracking on paper or in a spreadsheet for now? The timesheet templates work out each day's hours from start, end and break and add up the billable ones.

Invoicing without the app? Use the contractor invoice template for US clients or the UK invoice template, in Word, Excel or PDF. And to set the rate itself, the freelance rate calculator works out the hourly rate you need.