Free Employee Timesheet Templates

An employee timesheet records the hours worked in a pay period, and it is the document that stands between those hours and a correct paycheck. This page gives you six free templates and the federal overtime and recordkeeping rules behind them. If another founder asked me which HR record to get right first, I would point to this one.

Get the timesheet right and payroll is fast and accurate; get it wrong, or lose it, and you have both a payroll problem and a compliance gap. For a small business, it is often the only wage record you keep, which makes the format you choose and how you store it matter more than they seem.

These six templates cover the range: weekly, biweekly, semi-monthly, and monthly versions for each payroll cycle, a contractor version that doubles as an invoice basis, and a blank printable for manual entry. Each downloads as an Excel file, free and without an email, and all but the blank come with the totals already built as formulas.

What an Employee Timesheet Is

An employee timesheet is a record of the hours an employee worked during a pay period, used to calculate pay and to satisfy federal recordkeeping rules. It lists each day with a time in, time out, and break, separates regular from overtime hours, and totals the period. Timesheet, time sheet, and staff timesheet all describe the same document, and nothing about the format changes with the spelling.

A timesheet is an employer-side record, filled in by the employee or a manager and approved before payroll runs. Beyond driving pay, it does two jobs: it creates the approval trail that settles hours disputes, and it forms part of the wage record the Fair Labor Standards Act requires. The Department of Labor recordkeeping rules care about what the record shows, not how you capture it.

Time Card vs. Timesheet

A time card and a timesheet are the same record in almost every small business. The term time card comes from the paper card a worker punched into a mechanical clock, and the federal rules still use it: the recordkeeping regulation names time cards among the records used to compute wages. A timesheet is that same data on a sheet or a spreadsheet.

The one distinction worth keeping is granularity. A time card usually holds one worker and one period of punch times, typically on a printable weekly or biweekly grid. A timesheet more often carries task or project detail next to the hours. Every template here works either way, and the blank printable is the closest thing to a classic punch card.

Timesheet vs. Attendance Sheet

A timesheet and an attendance sheet are often confused, but they answer different questions. A timesheet records hours worked, and often the tasks those hours went to, which is what drives pay and overtime.

An attendance sheet records presence and absence, whether someone showed up and in what status, which is what you use for staffing and to spot patterns. Knowing which one a task needs keeps a small business from making one sheet do both jobs badly.

The practical rule: use a timesheet to capture the hours that drive pay. When what you need is presence and absence status rather than hours, a dedicated attendance sheet is the right document; this page covers the hours side.

What to Include

A complete timesheet covers four groups: identifying fields, hours data, totals and pay, and an approval trail. Here is what belongs in each one.

The two elements small businesses most often skip, and most need, are a separate overtime column and a manager approval line. The weekly, semi-monthly, and monthly templates build both in, with the overtime figured per workweek.

Timesheet Categories and Tracking Time by Project

Timesheet categories are the buckets each hour gets sorted into, and they decide what the sheet can tell you later. Every timesheet needs pay categories, because payroll depends on them. Work categories are optional, and worth adding only when you plan to use the answer for job costing, client billing, or planning capacity.

To track time by project or job, use the contractor sheet as a work log: keep the project or task column, add a client or job number beside it, and mark each line billable or not. The same file then works as a project time tracking spreadsheet, so whoever does the collecting has one file to chase instead of two.

Task-level tracking only survives if the categories stay few and obvious. A consultant splitting time across six clients will keep it up for years. A five-person shop with forty task codes will abandon it inside a month. Start with the pay categories, add project detail only where a real decision depends on it, and drop the rest.

Which Template Should You Use?

Match the template to your payroll cycle and worker type. Weekly for the simplest overtime math, biweekly for the most common US cycle, semi-monthly or monthly for salaried staff, the contractor version for freelance work, and the blank for manual entry.

6 Free Employee Timesheet Templates

Download all six as a single Excel set or grab individual templates. Each downloads as an Excel file with the time columns and totals already built, free and with no signup. Every template also opens cleanly in Google Sheets. Fill in the hours on any formula sheet and the totals calculate themselves.

Open the file in Google Sheets and it becomes an online timesheet people can fill in from anywhere; Sheets and Excel both print it or save it to PDF. For a paper version instead of a Word or Excel file, print the blank sheet and fill it in by hand, remembering that the formulas stay behind in the spreadsheet.

Template 1: Weekly Timesheet

Seven days with time in, time out, break, and separate regular and overtime columns that total automatically. The cleanest fit for hourly pay and weekly overtime.

Template 2: Biweekly Timesheet

Two weekly grids on separate tabs with a combined pay-period total, keeping each workweek separate so overtime is still figured per week. For the every-two-weeks cycle.

Template 3: Semi-Monthly Timesheet

A pay period running the 1st to the 15th and 16th to month end, with regular, overtime, and PTO columns. For the twice-a-month cycle that splits calendar weeks.

Template 4: Monthly Timesheet

A full-month day-by-day grid with regular and overtime totals, for monthly payroll or salaried staff, with a note that overtime is still figured per workweek.

Template 5: Contractor Timesheet

Date, project or task, start and end, hours, rate, and an auto-calculated amount, so the sheet doubles as an hours record and an invoice basis for independent contractors.

Template 6: Blank Printable Timesheet

A blank grid with name, date, time in and out, break, and totals, plus a signature line. Print it and fill it in by hand when a formula sheet is more than you need.

Choosing a Pay Period

The pay period you run determines which timesheet fits, and each has tradeoffs. Weekly is simplest for overtime; biweekly is the most common US cycle; semi-monthly suits salaried staff but splits calendar weeks; monthly is easiest to administer for small salaried teams. Here is how they compare.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Employment Statistics survey (February 2023), 43.0 percent of private establishments pay biweekly, ahead of weekly at 27.0 percent, semi-monthly at 19.8 percent, and monthly at 10.3 percent.

Matching the sheet to your own pay cycle is the whole decision, because the time in, time out, break, and hours columns are the same in every pay-period version. Whichever cycle you pick, overtime is still figured per workweek. A semi-monthly or monthly period will split workweeks across pay periods, so track hours by week underneath the pay period, then sum.

How to Fill Out the Timesheet

Filling out a timesheet takes a minute a day once it is set up. Here is the sequence the templates are built around.

Overtime and FLSA Recordkeeping

Two federal rules sit underneath every timesheet: how overtime is calculated, and how long you keep the record. Getting either wrong is a common and expensive small-business mistake, and both are simple once you know them.

Overtime is owed to non-exempt employees at one and one-half times their regular rate for hours worked over forty in a workweek, and it is calculated per workweek, not per pay period. Pay biweekly or monthly all you like; the overtime math still happens one week at a time.

A workweek is a fixed, regularly recurring period of 168 hours, seven consecutive 24-hour periods, and it need not start on a Monday or line up with the calendar week. Some states add a daily overtime rule on top, so confirm your state.

Whether overtime is owed at all turns on classification. The Department of Labor's white-collar exemption tests run on salary level and actual duties. The Department's fact sheet on those tests says plainly that job titles do not determine exempt status, so a salaried assistant manager can still be non-exempt and owed overtime.

When an employer's time records are inaccurate or inadequate, Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery (1946) lets an employee who proves unpaid work carry the burden by showing its amount and extent as a matter of just and reasonable inference. The burden then shifts to the employer to produce evidence of the precise hours worked or to rebut the inference.

In plain terms, when your records fall short, an employee's reasonable estimate of unpaid hours can stand unless you can disprove it, so approved timesheets are worth holding on to. Keeping every sheet for three years covers the longer retention window and the FLSA's statute of limitations, which allows two years to sue over unpaid minimum wages or overtime and three for a willful violation.

Timesheets for a Small Business

A large company runs time tracking through software and a payroll team. A small business has an owner or a manager collecting sheets directly, between everything else, and pays the price when hours are wrong or a record goes missing. The framework is the same at any size; a small business just needs it simple, per-workweek accurate, and retained.

The single most valuable habit is collecting an approved timesheet every period, in one consistent format, and holding onto it. A signed, retained record is what turns a payroll question into a two-minute lookup instead of an argument.

From Spreadsheet to HR Software

A spreadsheet timesheet is the right tool for a small team, and these templates work on their own. The strain shows up when hours, approvals, and record retention live in scattered files, when chasing sheets every period eats a manager's time, and when a lost record becomes a real liability.

When that point arrives, FirstHR centralizes the records around the timesheets: employee profiles hold the roster with each person's FLSA status and standard hours, and document storage keeps approved timesheets and wage records in one retrievable place for the retention period. In their own self-service portal, each employee e-signs the acknowledgments for the employee handbook and time-off policy.

FirstHR is an onboarding and HR platform, not a payroll processor: it does not run payroll, calculate wages, or replace a dedicated time clock, so pair it with your payroll provider and, for wage questions, a professional advisor. Applicant tracking is coming soon to FirstHR.

Frequently Asked Questions