How to Fill Out a Biweekly Timesheet

A biweekly pay period covers 14 fixed days, and a year has 26 of them. It is not the same as semimonthly (24 periods, paid on fixed dates like the 15th and last day). Biweekly paydays drift across the calendar, and twice a year there is a three-paycheck month. On the timesheet itself, the practical difference matters more: a biweekly timesheet always spans exactly two workweeks, and overtime is calculated per workweek, not per timesheet.

A full-time year is 2,080 hours (52 weeks × 40), which over 26 biweekly periods averages to 80.00 hours per paycheck. Nearly every real paycheck deviates a little, because schedules and start and end times never land on round numbers.

Timesheets want the length of each shift. If your source is a punch record, subtract: out minus in, then subtract any unpaid lunch. A shift from 8:15 to 16:45 with a 30-minute unpaid lunch is 8 hours 30 minutes of work minus 30 minutes, or 8 hours 00 minutes.

Write the raw duration down first, even if the timesheet wants decimals. Trying to do the subtraction and the conversion in one step is where most errors start.

Divide each day’s minutes by 60 and add the hours: 8h 00m becomes 8.00, 7h 50m becomes 7.83, 8h 55m becomes 8.92. Two decimal places is the standard manual precision; the converters on this site do it instantly if you would rather not divide by hand.

Here is week one of a sample timesheet, with each day already converted:

This is the step people skip, and it is the one that matters for overtime. Federal law (and every payroll system) counts overtime by the workweek. Week one above totaled 38.92 hours, under 40, so all of it is regular time.

Now say week two of the same timesheet totals 43.50 hours: 10 shifts, two weeks, 82.42 hours combined. The two-week number is not what payroll uses. Week two is over 40 by 3.50 hours, and those 3.50 hours must be paid at 1.5 times the regular rate. The overtime guide covers that multiplication with worked examples.

Three sanity checks catch almost every mistake. First, the week totals should be close to the scheduled hours; a week of 43.00 when you were scheduled 40 is either real overtime or a fat-fingered entry. Second, every day should be between 0 and 24 decimal hours; anything outside that range means a date got mixed up. Third, re-add the columns once using minutes instead of decimals if anything looks off: minutes are the ground truth.

Then submit on time. Late timesheets are the most common reason a paycheck needs a manual correction on the next cycle.

Compare the hours on the pay stub with what you submitted, week by week. The stub will show decimal hours (for example 82.42, or a split like 78.92 regular + 3.50 overtime). To read an unfamiliar decimal as real time, multiply the fractional part by 60: 0.42 hours is 25 minutes, so 82.42 is 82 hours 25 minutes across the period.

If the stub does not match, check rounding first. Many employers round punches to the nearest 15 minutes before computing hours, which explains small differences in either direction. The time card rounding guide explains what is allowed and what is not.

Photograph or save every submitted timesheet. When a pay dispute comes up months later, the person with the contemporaneous record wins the argument. Your own log of clock-in and clock-out times is also the only way to tell whether an auto-deducted lunch or a rounding rule is quietly changing your totals.