Lunch Break Calculator

Subtract an unpaid lunch break from a shift to find the paid hours that should be reported on a time card. The tool supports both unpaid and paid lunch scenarios, so you can model what happens when an employer reclassifies a break, or when a state law treats short meals as paid time.

Use it whenever your employer deducts a fixed or actual lunch period and you want to confirm the paid hours total. It is also helpful when you are settling a question about a missed lunch, when you are tracking lunch lengths across a week to see if you regularly skip part of a meal, or when you are auditing a stub.

The calculator computes the shift length, deducts the lunch minutes when the lunch is unpaid, and divides the result by 60 for decimal hours. With the paid lunch toggle on, the lunch length is reported but not subtracted. Overnight shifts are handled with the standard 24 hour adjustment.

The output shows total time at work, the lunch length in minutes, paid time in HH:MM, and the decimal-hour value for payroll. Compare paid time to your stub. If the lunch is paid in your handbook but the stub deducted it, the gap is the lunch length times your rate.

A 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM shift with a 30 minute unpaid lunch has 8.5 hours of clock time and 8.0 hours of paid time, or 8.00 decimal hours. A 60 minute lunch in the same shift drops paid time to 7.5 hours. The same 30 minute lunch flagged paid keeps paid time at 8.5 hours and adds 0.5 hours of pay back into the day.

If your state requires a paid rest break, or your employer treats short meals as paid, do not deduct that time as unpaid here. The tool only handles the deduction you choose. California requires premium pay when an employer fails to provide a meal break in a long shift, which the tool does not model.