Minutes to Decimal Hours Converter

What this minutes to decimal converter does

This minutes to decimal converter turns a time written in hours and minutes into decimal hours, the format payroll software, invoices and spreadsheets multiply by a rate. Type 7 hours and 45 minutes and you get 7.75. It also works the other way, from decimal hours back to hours and minutes, and converts a whole list of times at once with a total at the bottom.

Below the converter is a full minutes to decimal chart for every minute from 1 to 60, a quarter-hour table and a print button. Choose two or four decimal places, and round to the nearest tenth or quarter hour if that is how your payroll counts time.

How to use the converter

1. Time → decimal. Enter hours and minutes, with seconds if you have them. To convert minutes alone, leave Hours empty: 135 minutes is 2.25 hours. You can also type a whole time such as 7:45 or 7h 45m into the Hours box; Minutes and Seconds are then ignored, and a note under the fields says so, so 7:45 is never counted as 7:45 plus another 45 minutes.
2. Pick the decimal places and payroll rounding. The large result follows your choice, and the table under it shows the time exact, to the nearest tenth and to the nearest quarter, so you can compare. An optional hourly rate multiplies the time itself (after any payroll rounding), not the decimal shown: 7 hours 20 minutes at 15.00 pays 110.00, while 7.33 × 15 would give 109.95.
3. Decimal → time. Type decimal hours such as 7.75 or 7,75 and read 7:45, plus the time to the second and in words.
4. Batch / timesheet. Paste one time per line. A label in front is kept (Mon 7:45), and 7:45, 7h 45m, 1 hr 30 min and 45m are all understood. Choose whether a plain number such as 465 means minutes or hours. A label that ends in a number followed by a plain number, such as Mon 7 45, is read as the label "Mon 7" and 45 minutes and marked for checking; type Mon 7:45 for 7 hours 45 minutes. Copy the decimals as a column for a spreadsheet, or download a CSV.

Lines that cannot be read are flagged and left out of the total rather than guessed.

The formula: divide minutes by 60

An hour has 60 minutes, so each minute is 1/60 of an hour:

decimal hours = hours + minutes ÷ 60 + seconds ÷ 3,600

For 7 hours 45 minutes: 45 ÷ 60 = 0.75, so the answer is 7.75. For 8 hours 20 minutes: 20 ÷ 60 = 0.3333…, which is 8.33 to two places or 8.3333 to four. For 1 hour 23 minutes 45 seconds, the seconds add 45 ÷ 3,600 = 0.0125 and the total is 1.3958.

Only multiples of 3 minutes come out exact at two places (3 minutes is 0.05, 15 minutes is 0.25). Every other minute gives a repeating decimal, which is why the decimal places setting exists. Two places is the payroll norm; four keeps a long list of times accurate until the end.

Converting decimal hours back to hours and minutes

Reverse the steps. Keep the whole number as hours and multiply the decimal part by 60:

minutes = decimal part × 60

7.75 hours is 7 hours plus 0.75 × 60 = 45 minutes, so 7:45. 1.2 hours is 1:12, and 0.1 hours is exactly 6 minutes.

When the result is not a whole number of minutes, it is rounded to the nearest minute. 7.999 hours is 479.94 minutes, which displays as 8:00 instead of the impossible 7:60. To the second, it is 7:59:56.

Payroll rounding: tenths and quarters

Many payroll and billing systems record time in steps instead of exact minutes. A tenth of an hour is 6 minutes; a quarter is 15. These tables show which minutes past the hour round to each step. Exact halves round up.

Minutes past the hour	Nearest tenth
0–2	.0
3–8	.1
9–14	.2
15–20	.3
21–26	.4
27–32	.5
33–38	.6
39–44	.7
45–50	.8
51–56	.9
57–59	next hour

Minutes past the hour	Nearest quarter
0–7	.00
8–22	.25
23–37	.50
38–52	.75
53–59	next hour

So 7:45 stays 7.75 under quarter rounding but becomes 7.8 under tenth rounding, and 8:20 becomes 8.3 or 8.25. In the U.S., federal rules allow employers to round to the nearest 5 minutes, tenth or quarter hour as long as it averages out over time (29 CFR 785.48(b)). Some states are stricter; California, for example, does not allow rounding of meal-break punches. Rules in other countries differ.

Practical examples

A payroll clerk entering a week. The example in the batch tab is Mon 7:45, Tue 8:20, Wed 6:05, Thu 7h 50m and Fri 465 (minutes). That is 2,265 minutes, or 37:45, which is 37.75 hours. At 16.00 an hour the pay is 604.00.

The same week under rounding. With nearest-tenth rounding each day becomes 7.8, 8.3, 6.1, 7.8 and 7.8, totaling 37.80. With nearest-quarter rounding the days become 7.75, 8.25, 6.00, 7.75 and 7.75, totaling 37.50, a quarter hour less than rounding the 37.75 total once. Which order applies is your employer's policy, so the batch tab tells you when the two differ.

A consultant billing in tenths. A 20-minute call is 0.3 hours under nearest-tenth rounding and a 21-minute call is 0.4. Billing in 6-minute units is common in legal and consulting work.

Copying a timesheet into a spreadsheet. These are typical entries and their two-place decimals:

Time worked	Decimal hours
7:15	7.25
7:20	7.33
7:40	7.67
8:10	8.17
8:50	8.83
9:05	9.08

Decimal hours in Excel and Google Sheets

A spreadsheet stores a time as a fraction of a 24-hour day, so 7:45 is held as about 0.3229. Multiply by 24 to get decimal hours: if A2 contains 7:45, =A2*24 returns 7.75 once you format the cell as a number. To go back, divide decimal hours by 24 and format the cell as a time. For weekly totals above 24 hours, format durations as [h]:mm in Excel, or use the Duration format in Google Sheets, so 37:45 does not wrap around to 13:45.

Tips and common mistakes

• Reading 7.30 as seven and a half hours. In decimal, 7.30 is 7 hours 18 minutes; seven and a half hours is 7.50. At 20 an hour that one entry is the difference between 146.00 and 150.00.
• Adding rounded decimals. The example week rounded day by day to two places is 7.75 + 8.33 + 6.08 + 7.83 + 7.75 = 37.74, while the true total is 37.75. Add the minutes first, or keep four places, then round once.
• Rounding twice. If your time clock already rounds punches to the quarter hour, do not round the daily totals again.
• Minutes over 59. They are fine here: 0 hours 135 minutes is 2.25 hours. In a strict h:mm field, write 2:15 instead.

For a full week of clock-in and clock-out times with breaks and overtime, use the time card calculator, which shows every day in both formats. The hourly to salary calculator takes a decimal-hours schedule to yearly pay, and the military time converter handles 24-hour clock readings.

Privacy and limitations

All conversions run in your browser. Nothing you type is uploaded; the values you entered last stay with this browser tab and are cleared when you close it.

Results are rounded for display to the places you choose, so a two-place answer can differ from the exact fraction by up to 0.005 hours. The batch tab converts up to 2,000 lines at a time and does not accept negative times. Rounding follows the rules described above, which may not match every payroll system, so confirm your employer's method before using the figures for pay.