How to Calculate Minutes Worked

Correctly calculating minutes worked is vital to ensuring that employees are paid properly for their efforts. Payroll-related mistakes are not just annoying for employees, they can also be financially burdensome as you might find out later that you need to be make up for missed payments or modify future paychecks to correct an overpayment. To decrease the likelihood of payroll mistakes, engage in careful minutes worked calculations following a consistent, systematic approach.

• 1

  Choose an interval structure. While you can pay employees by the minute, most employers elect to use a larger interval when calculating time. Determine whether you want your pay to be minute by minute, or if you would instead prefer to pay employees based on 10- or 15-minute intervals of work, as is more commonly used.

• 2

  Obtain the worker's time from the time recording system. Either obtain a daily time break down or the time for an entire week of work to complete your calculations.

• 3

  Multiply the number of hours listed on the time sheet by your interval figure. If you are calculating based on a one-minute interval, multiply the number of hours, including any decimals that indicate partial hours, by 60. If calculating based on a 10-minute interval, multiply the number of hours by 6. If calculating based on a 15-minute interval, multiply the number of hours by four. For instance, if 8 hours of work was done, multiply by 60 to get 480 minutes of work.

• 4

  Subtract unpaid break times from the total. For example, if 480 minutes of work was done, but the employee took two 10-minute breaks, subtract 20 from 480 to get 460 minutes of work.