Nine ready-to-use timesheets — pick your pay period or your role, and download it in Excel, Google Sheets or printable PDF. The spreadsheet versions calculate hours, overtime and gross pay as you type.
Nine templates, two ways to choose. Filter by the pay period you run, or by who is filling the sheet in. Every timesheet template downloads in three formats — Excel, Google Sheets and printable PDF — and none of them ask for your email.
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Pay period
Weekly timesheet template
The standard sheet for hourly staff — Monday to Sunday on one page.
What is inside
Type the Monday date once and the whole week fills in
Daily hours from clock-in, clock-out and break
Regular and overtime split at 40 hours for the week
A timesheet is a payroll record before it is anything else. Every template here follows the same timesheet layout, and if a sheet is missing one of these fields it will not settle a dispute and it will not satisfy an auditor.
Who worked — full name, and an employee or contractor ID if you use them.
The period covered — the exact dates, not "week 3".
Clock-in and clock-out times — not just a total. Totals cannot be checked; times can.
Unpaid breaks — recorded separately, because they come out of paid time.
Daily and period totals — with regular and overtime hours split apart.
What the time was spent on — project, task, client or matter.
Approval — a signature or an approver name, with the date.
Under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, employers must keep payroll records — including hours worked each day and each workweek — for at least two years for the underlying time records, and three years for payroll records themselves. State law is sometimes stricter, so keep the sheets rather than throwing them out at year end.
How to fill one in
The spreadsheet versions do the arithmetic. Your part is the record.
Fill the header once. Name, period, department, approver. In the dated templates, enter the first day and the rest of the dates appear on their own.
Log times as you go, not on Friday. Enter them as 9:00 AM and 5:30 PM, or 09:00 and 17:30 — either is fine.
Put breaks in hours. 0.5 means thirty minutes. Unpaid breaks come out of the day automatically.
Add the context. Project, task, client or matter — this is what makes the sheet useful in three months.
Check the totals, then get it approved. Regular and overtime hours are already split; sign it and send it on.
Filling one in for the first time? Our step-by-step guide on how to fill out a timesheet walks through a completed example.
Overtime: the weekly rule and the daily rule
Most timesheet mistakes are overtime mistakes, and nearly all of them come from one of two misunderstandings.
Overtime is per workweek, never per pay period
Under the FLSA, overtime is owed for hours past 40 in a single workweek. On a biweekly sheet, 45 hours one week and 35 the next is five hours of overtime — not zero. Averaging the two weeks is one of the most common wage-and-hour errors there is, which is why the biweekly template keeps each week in its own block.
Some states add a daily rule on top
There is no daily overtime under federal law — a 12-hour day inside a 38-hour week earns no premium. California, Alaska, Nevada, Colorado and a few others disagree and require time-and-a-half after 8 hours in a day, with double time past 12 in California. Where both rules apply, the employee gets whichever is greater. The overtime template shows the daily split and the weekly check side by side so you can compare.
Hours in the week
Federal FLSA rule
California-style daily rule
38 hours, one 12-hour day
No overtime
4 hours at 1.5×
45 hours, five 9-hour days
5 hours at 1.5×
5 hours at 1.5×
50 hours, one 14-hour day
10 hours at 1.5×
1.5× and 2× on the long day, then the weekly comparison
This page is general information, not legal advice. Check your state rules, and any collective agreement, before you run payroll.
Excel, Google Sheets or PDF — which to use
Every template comes in all three. They are not interchangeable, so pick deliberately.
Excel timesheet template (.xlsx)
The full version: live formulas, dropdowns, print setup. Best when one person owns the file and payroll wants it emailed over. Opens in Excel, Numbers and LibreOffice.
Google Sheets timesheet template
The same sheet, shared. Best when several people fill in the same file or a manager needs to watch the week as it happens. Opening it makes a copy in your own Drive — we never see your data.
Printable timesheet template (PDF)
One printable page, nothing to calculate. Best on a wall, a clipboard or a job site with no laptop — the timesheet PDF prints on a single sheet and the totals are filled in by hand.
Where paper and spreadsheets start to cost you
A template is the right answer for one person, one team, or a business that is still small enough to see. It stops being the right answer at a predictable point, and it is worth knowing the signs.
Times get remembered, not recorded. A sheet filled in on Friday is an estimate. Estimates round up — research on manual time reporting has long put the drift in the range of several minutes per shift, every shift.
Nobody can verify a number. A typed 8:58 and a real 9:20 look identical on the sheet.
Chasing takes longer than the payroll run. Fifteen people, fifteen files, one missing sheet, and the run waits.
Overtime is calculated by hand. The averaging mistake above is the single most common one, and it is expensive.
Files go missing. A laptop dies and the payroll record for the quarter dies with it — while the law still expects you to produce it.
From timesheet to payroll
WebWork does the same job as these templates, without anyone filling anything in. Time is recorded as it happens on desktop, mobile or the web app, timesheets build themselves, and managers approve a week instead of collecting files. Overtime is split by the rules, and the totals go straight into payroll and invoices — with optional screenshots and activity levels when the work is remote.
Yes. Download any of the nine in Excel, Google Sheets or PDF. There is no sign-up, no email gate and no watermark, and you can edit them however you like.
Which timesheet template should I use?
Match it to how you pay. Weekly and biweekly cover most hourly staff, monthly suits salaried people, and the daily sheet suits work split across several jobs a day. If you are paying a team, start with the team sheet; if you bill clients, use the contractor or attorney version.
Do the templates calculate hours automatically?
The Excel and Google Sheets versions do. Enter clock-in, clock-out and break, and the sheet works out hours per day, the regular and overtime split, and gross pay. Overnight shifts are handled — a shift from 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM counts as eight hours, not a negative number. The PDF version is for filling in by hand.
How do the templates handle overtime?
The weekly, biweekly and team sheets apply the federal rule: hours past 40 in a workweek are overtime, paid at 1.5×. The biweekly sheet keeps each week separate, so a heavy week followed by a light one still shows overtime. The overtime template also applies the daily rule used in California and some other states — 8 hours regular, 8 to 12 at 1.5×, past 12 at 2×.
Can I use these for contractors and freelancers?
Yes — the contractor template is built for it, with client, project, rate, amount and an invoice total. Bear in mind that tracking a contractor's hours does not by itself make them an employee, but heavy control over when and how they work can affect classification.
Why does the attorney template round up to a tenth of an hour?
Because law firms bill in six-minute increments. The sheet records your actual time and then rounds the billed figure up to the next 0.1 — so 1 hour 13 minutes is recorded as 1.22 and billed as 1.3. It also tracks no-charge and written-off time, and shows your realization rate.
How long do I have to keep timesheets?
Under the FLSA, keep the underlying time records for at least two years and payroll records for three. Several states require longer, so check yours before clearing anything out.
Can several people fill in the same timesheet?
Use the Google Sheets version for that — everyone works in one file and the manager sees the week as it fills. The team template is designed for it, with one row per person and a payroll total at the bottom.
Do you see the data I enter?
No. The Excel and PDF files download to your computer, and opening the Google Sheets version creates a copy in your own Drive. Nothing you type reaches us.
When should we stop using a spreadsheet?
When chasing sheets takes longer than running payroll, when nobody can verify the times, or when overtime is being worked out by hand across more than a handful of people. That is the point where automatic time tracking pays for itself.
Is it a timesheet or a time sheet?
Both spellings are correct and mean the same document — a time sheet template and a timesheet template are the same thing, and a timesheet form is another name for it. We write it as one word throughout, but every template on this page is what you are looking for either way.
