Time to Decimal Converter

What the time to decimal converter does

This takes hours and minutes and turns them into decimal hours. So 8 hours and 30 minutes comes out as 8.5. That decimal form is what timesheets, payroll, and billing systems run on, because it is the version you can do arithmetic with. It also shows you the same amount as a total number of minutes, in case that is the figure you need.

How to use it

1. Hours. The whole hours.
2. Minutes. The minutes, from 0 to 59.

Press Calculate and it shows the decimal hours, along with the total in minutes.

How the conversion works

The whole trick is what to do with the minutes. An hour has 60 minutes, so each minute is one sixtieth of an hour. To convert, you divide the minutes by 60 and add the result to the hours. For 8 hours 30 minutes, that is 30 divided by 60, which is 0.5, added to 8, giving 8.5. The hours pass straight through, and only the minutes need the division.

Why payroll and billing want decimals

It comes down to multiplication. To work out pay or a bill, you multiply an hourly rate by the number of hours, and "8 hours 30 minutes" does not multiply cleanly, whereas 8.5 does. So before hours go into a payroll run or onto an invoice, they get turned into decimals. It is the same reason a freelancer billing two and a quarter hours enters 2.25 rather than trying to multiply by two hours and fifteen minutes. The decimal is just the shape the maths needs.

A small cheatsheet

A handful of these are worth keeping in your head. Fifteen minutes is 0.25, thirty minutes is 0.5, and forty-five minutes is 0.75. From there you can read off a lot of times at a glance, so 7 hours 45 minutes is 7.75 and 3 hours 15 minutes is 3.25. For the in-between minutes that are not as tidy, the tool does the division for you.

Where it fits

Filling in a timesheet, entering hours into payroll, and billing clients by the hour, anywhere the hours have to be a decimal for the sums to work. If you need to go the other way, taking a decimal back to hours and minutes, a decimal-to-time converter is the matching tool for that.

Questions people ask

How do I convert hours and minutes to a decimal?

Divide the minutes by 60 and add them to the hours. So 8 hours 30 minutes is 8 plus 30 divided by 60, which is 8.5.

What is 30 minutes as a decimal?

0.5. Fifteen minutes is 0.25 and forty-five minutes is 0.75, since each is that fraction of an hour.

What is 8 hours 15 minutes in decimal?

8.25, because 15 minutes is a quarter of an hour, which is 0.25 added to the 8.

How do I turn a decimal back into time?

For that direction, use a decimal-to-time converter, which takes a figure like 8.25 and gives you 8 hours and 15 minutes.