Free Weekly Timesheet Template for Small Business

A weekly timesheet is the simplest way to turn hours worked into a correct paycheck, and the templates below are built to be filled in on Friday and run through payroll the same day. If another founder asked me which payroll record to get right first, I would point to this one, because it is the page you pull out when anyone questions their hours.

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 formulas and totals built in.

The weekly rhythm is what makes the format work: overtime is owed for hours over forty in a workweek, so a sheet that covers exactly one week makes the overtime math obvious. For a small business without a payroll department, that clarity matters. The single-employee and team sheets also come with the timekeeping fields required by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) already in place.

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 are two spellings of the same document, and a weekly time card template is that same record again, named after the card a punch clock used to stamp.

The weekly format is popular for a practical reason: federal overtime is counted one workweek at a time, so a sheet that matches the workweek shows at a glance when someone passes forty hours. 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. If you are unsure, start with the single-employee sheet; each of the other five fits one situation, from a whole team on one page to a biweekly 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 and totals already built, free and with no signup, and the single-employee, team, and daily sheets add an overtime column and a setup tab. 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.

If your crews report daily, the daily sheet is the source record, but the workweek is still the payroll unit. Total each week on its own, since federal overtime is owed on hours over forty in the week rather than on one long day. Keep the signed daily sheets after they roll into the weekly total, because they are part of the underlying records used to compute wages.

The daily sheet above is deliberately generic. Billable work split by client, a whole crew initialing one card, and trades logged against cost codes and job sites each want their own daily layout. On federally funded construction under the Davis-Bacon Act, those daily field sheets are also the documentation behind the weekly certified payroll, which contractors can submit on the optional Department of Labor (DOL) Form WH-347.

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. Biweekly is the most common US pay frequency: according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Employment Statistics survey (February 2023), 43.0 percent of private establishments pay every two weeks and 27.0 percent pay weekly.

The FLSA-Required Fields

Parts of a weekly timesheet are not optional: federal recordkeeping rules call for them. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to record specific information for each non-exempt worker, meaning each employee entitled to overtime, 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 comes down to five steps: set up the header, log each day, split regular from overtime hours, total the week, and get it signed. Building one from scratch takes a few minutes, but starting from one of the templates above takes seconds. The steps below are the sequence the templates are built around, whether you use them or build your own.

Printing the Weekly Timesheet

A printable weekly timesheet earns its place when the crew writes hours by hand and the office types them up later, or when you want a signed paper copy in the file. Clear the sample times first so the grid comes out empty, then print one sheet per employee for the week.

In Excel, open File, then Print, and set the scaling to fit the sheet on one page. To keep a PDF instead, open File, then Save As, and choose PDF as the file type. In Google Sheets, open File, then Download, and pick PDF. Whichever route you take, keep the signature and approval lines on the printed page, since that is what turns the sheet into a record.

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. They are simple enough to use every week, and the single-employee and team sheets come with the compliance fields already in place, so the record is correct without a specialist.

The habit that pays off most comes after approval: file every signed, approved sheet in the same place and hold 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. It is figured per workweek, not per pay period, and the Department of Labor does not permit averaging hours across two or more weeks. The weekly timesheet makes this natural, since the week is the unit.

Retention, the second rule, applies to timesheets because they are the underlying records used to compute wages.

Because timesheets are wage records, keeping them protects you. Under the Supreme Court decision in Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co. (1946), when an employer keeps inadequate time records, an employee can prove unpaid hours by just and reasonable inference, meaning a reasonable estimate backed by evidence. The burden then shifts to the employer to show the precise hours worked or that the estimate is unreasonable.

Common Timesheet Mistakes

Most timesheet problems come down to five recurring mistakes. Each has a simple fix, and the fixes for the first three are 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 gives the paperwork around the weekly sheets one home. Employee profiles keep the roster along with each person's FLSA status and standard hours, document storage holds approved timesheets and wage records where you can retrieve them for the whole retention period, and employees e-sign their handbook and time-off policy acknowledgments in the self-service portal.

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