Free Weekly Timesheet Template for Small Business

A weekly timesheet is the simplest way to turn hours worked into a correct paycheck, and its weekly rhythm is what makes it so useful: because overtime is owed for hours over forty in a workweek, a sheet that covers exactly one week makes the overtime math obvious. For a small business without a payroll department, that clarity matters. These templates are built to be filled in on Friday and run through payroll the same day, with the fields federal recordkeeping actually requires already in place.

There are six here, and they cover more than just the standard weekly grid: a single-employee sheet, a multiple-employee team sheet, a version with lunch and break columns, a daily sheet for field crews, a time log for activity tracking, and a biweekly bridge. Each downloads as an Excel file, free and without an email, with the overtime formulas and totals built in. Because hours sit next to leave and attendance, this pairs with your time off policy and your absenteeism policy.

What a Weekly Timesheet Is

A weekly timesheet is a record of the hours an employee worked over a single week, used to calculate pay and to meet federal recordkeeping rules. It lists each day with a time in, time out, and break, separates regular from overtime hours, and totals the week. Weekly timesheet and weekly time sheet describe the same document; the spellings are treated as equivalent.

The weekly format is popular for a practical reason: overtime is owed for hours over forty in a workweek, so a sheet that covers exactly one week makes the overtime obvious. It is an employer-side record, filled in by the employee and approved by a manager before payroll runs, and it forms part of the wage record the Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to keep.

Which Template Should You Use?

Match the template to your team and how they report hours. One employee or a whole team, with break tracking or without, daily for field crews, a time log for activity billing, or biweekly for that pay cycle.

6 Free Weekly Timesheet Templates

Download all six as a single Excel set or grab individual templates. Each downloads as an Excel file with the time columns, overtime, totals, and a setup tab already built, free and with no signup. Every template also opens cleanly in Google Sheets, so you can copy it and share a live version with your team.

Template 1: Weekly Timesheet, Single Employee

The default: a seven-day grid for one hourly employee with time in and out, break, separate regular and overtime columns, a weekly total, and signature and approval lines.

Template 2: Weekly Timesheet, Multiple Employees

One row per employee across the week, with regular, overtime, rate, and total pay per person and a team total. For a manager tracking a small team on one sheet.

Template 3: Weekly Timesheet with Breaks

Explicit lunch-out and lunch-in columns with an unpaid meal deduction and a paid short-break column, so break rules are applied correctly. For retail, hospitality, and shift work.

Template 4: Daily Timesheet

A single-day sheet broken out by task or job site, with time in and out, overtime, and notes. For construction and field crews submitting hours at the end of each day.

Template 5: Time Log Sheet

A chronological log of activities by time, with task, start, end, duration, project, and priority. For freelance billing and project costing. This is a different document from a payroll timesheet.

Template 6: Biweekly Timesheet

Two weekly grids on separate tabs with a combined pay-period total, keeping each workweek separate so overtime stays correct. For the every-two-weeks payroll cycle.

The FLSA-Required Fields

A weekly timesheet is not just a convenience; parts of it are what federal recordkeeping expects. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to record specific information for each non-exempt worker, and a good timesheet builds those fields in rather than leaving them out. The four groups below combine the required fields with the approval trail that makes the record defensible.

How to Create a Timesheet

Creating a weekly timesheet from scratch takes a few minutes, but starting from one of the templates above takes seconds. Here is the sequence the templates are built around, whether you use them or build your own.

Breaks, Meals, and Paid Time

Breaks are where a lot of small businesses get timesheets wrong, because the rule is not intuitive. A short break is paid; a real meal is not. Getting this backward either shorts employees on pay or overpays them, and the first creates real liability.

The practical rule for the timesheet: include short rest breaks in hours worked, and deduct only genuine meal periods where the employee is completely off duty. If someone eats at their desk and keeps answering the phone, that meal is not bona fide and must be paid. The weekly timesheet with breaks handles this with separate columns for the unpaid meal and the paid short break.

Weekly Timesheets Without HR

A large company runs time tracking through software and a payroll team that knows the rules. A small business has an owner or a manager collecting weekly sheets and running payroll themselves, which is where honest mistakes on overtime, breaks, and retention happen. The templates here are built for exactly that situation: simple enough to use every week, but with the compliance fields already in place so the record is correct without a specialist.

The single most valuable habit is collecting a signed, approved sheet every week in one consistent format and holding onto it. A weekly record you can actually produce is what turns a payroll question into a quick lookup instead of a dispute.

FLSA Compliance and Recordkeeping

Two federal rules sit underneath every weekly timesheet: how overtime is figured, and how long you keep the record. Both are simple once you know them, and both are common small-business mistakes when you do not.

Overtime is owed to non-exempt employees at one and one-half times the regular rate for hours worked over forty in a workweek, figured per workweek, not per pay period. The weekly timesheet makes this natural, since the week is the unit. On retention, timesheets are the underlying record used to compute wages.

Because timesheets are wage records, keeping them is not just tidy but protective: when an employer cannot produce adequate time records, the advantage shifts to the employee in a wage dispute. For the classification that decides whether overtime is owed at all, the exempt vs. non-exempt guide covers the duties and salary tests.

Common Timesheet Mistakes

Most timesheet problems come down to five recurring mistakes, and each has a simple fix built into how the templates are structured.

From Spreadsheet to HR Software

A weekly spreadsheet is the right tool for a small team, and these templates work on their own. The strain shows up when chasing sheets every Friday eats a manager's time, when approvals live in email, and when a lost record becomes a liability in a wage dispute.

When that point arrives, FirstHR centralizes what the weekly spreadsheets were doing separately: employee profiles hold the roster and rates, a self-service portal lets employees submit and managers approve, e-signature captures the sign-off, and document storage keeps timesheets and wage records in one retrievable place for the retention period, alongside 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