Two work hours trackers live on this page. A free TimePrivate calculator that totals a week of shifts, unpaid breaks and overtime right here in the browser, and downloads to CSV. And the TimePrivate Mac app, which does the same job every day on its own and keeps the result in a database on your machine.
The calculator works in any browser today. The app is not released yet: Apple Silicon Macs first, Windows on the roadmap.
A work hours tracker records three things: when the shift started, when it ended, and which minutes were unpaid. Every report, timesheet and payroll export is arithmetic on top of those three. TimePrivate ships two of them, and they answer different questions.
The TimePrivate app is not released, so there is nothing to download or buy today. The calculator works right now.
TimePrivate's work hours calculator takes punch times in and unpaid break minutes out. Overnight shifts are handled, each day can be rounded the way your employer rounds, anything past 40 hours gets split out, an optional pay rate turns the week into an estimated gross, and the whole thing downloads to CSV. The arithmetic runs inside this page, so the times you type are not submitted anywhere and there is nothing to install.
| Day | Start | End | Break (min) | Worked |
|---|
Decimal hours are what most payroll systems ask for: 7 hours 30 minutes is 7.50, not 7.30. The break column simply subtracts whatever you type, so enter the minutes your employer does not pay for and leave paid breaks alone. Rounding is applied to each day after the break comes out, so a 7h 52m day becomes 7h 45m on the quarter hour setting. The pay rate is currency neutral: TimePrivate multiplies whatever number you type, prices the hours past 40 at 1.5 times that rate, and shows a gross figure before tax and deductions. The 40 hour split and the 1.5 multiplier are the common US pattern, not a rule that fits every job. Your contract, state or province may compute overtime differently, so treat this as a total to check against your paycheque, not as legal or payroll advice.
TimePrivate's work hours tracker wants four numbers a day and two optional settings. No account, no email, no install, and the same six steps whether you are on macOS or Windows.
One row per day in the TimePrivate calculator table. Whether you see a 24 hour or an AM and PM box depends on your operating system, and both compute the same. An end time earlier than the start is read as crossing midnight, so 22:00 to 06:00 lands as 8h 0m.
Type unpaid minutes in the break column and this work hours tracker subtracts exactly that, with no guessing. A 30 minute unpaid lunch turns an 8h 30m day into 8h 0m. Paid breaks belong in the total, so leave the column empty for those.
Set the rounding menu in the TimePrivate calculator to whatever your timekeeping system does: exact minutes, tenths of an hour, the quarter hour, or the half hour. Each day is rounded on its own after the break comes out, so 08:57 to 17:04 with no break is 8h 7m exact and 8h 0m on the quarter hour.
Type your hourly rate into the TimePrivate calculator and it prices the week: regular hours at your rate, hours past 40 at 1.5 times it, and the two added up as an estimated gross before tax. Leave it blank and the pay row stays hidden.
The TimePrivate calculator returns the week in hours and minutes, the same week in decimal hours for payroll, everything up to 40 hours as regular, and the remainder past 40. A 45 hour week reads 45h 0m, 45.00, 40h 0m regular and 5h 0m past 40.
Download CSV writes one row per day plus the weekly totals into a file your browser saves to your own downloads folder. It opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets. The file is built inside this page by TimePrivate, so your times are not sent to a server.
Doing the same job on paper or in a spreadsheet instead? The TimePrivate weekly timesheet template builds a blank seven day grid dated from the Monday you pick, with a project column and the same unpaid break column, and the finished week comes straight back into this calculator to be totalled.
Rounding is the quietest source of a wrong paycheque, so the TimePrivate work hours calculator lets you total the same week both ways and compare. Punch times almost never land on a tidy number, and every timekeeping system decides what to do about the leftover minutes.
Every minute between the punches counts, less the unpaid break. Set the TimePrivate calculator to exact minutes when you want the true figure to hold up against whatever your employer's system produced. A week of five 08:57 to 17:04 days with a 30 minute unpaid lunch runs 7h 37m a day and totals 38h 5m exact.
Quarter hour rounding is what most US time clocks do, and it is where the "7 minute rule" name comes from: minutes 1 to 7 past the quarter round down, 8 to 14 round up. That same five day week rounds to 7h 30m a day and totals 37h 30m on the TimePrivate calculator's quarter hour setting, 35 minutes below the exact figure. Clock in at 08:53 instead and it rounds your way, which is the point of checking rather than assuming.
Six minute blocks come from law firms and agencies that bill in tenths, and some payroll systems inherited them. Set the TimePrivate calculator to tenths and each day snaps to 0.1 of an hour, so 8h 7m becomes 8h 6m and reads as 8.10 in the decimal column your payroll form asks for.
What rounding is not: a licence to lose time. US federal wage rules have long tolerated rounding to the nearest quarter hour on the understanding that it evens out and does not consistently favour the employer, and recent state level cases have pushed employers toward exact minutes instead. Rules differ by country and state, so TimePrivate's job here is only to show you both numbers. If the gap between them is one way every single week, that is the conversation to have with payroll, and the CSV download is the thing to bring to it.
Search for a work hours tracker and you get three kinds of answer, and TimePrivate is a fourth. The first three are not wrong. They just answer different questions, and they leave the record in different hands.
Totals one week and forgets it the moment you close the tab. Useful for checking a paycheque, useless for the question "how many hours did I work in March".
Good for punching in and out on a job site. Your history lives in whatever account the developer runs, which is why both app stores now print a privacy label next to the download button.
The workspace belongs to whoever pays for it. An administrator can see it, change it, and close it. That is the deal, and it is fine until you leave the job.
There is a fourth case that almost nothing serves: you want your own copy. Not instead of your employer's system, alongside it. The US Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division publishes a timesheet app of its own for workers, which tells you keeping your own record is ordinary practice rather than paranoia. TimePrivate is built for that case. Being honest about the limit: it cannot stop other software on your Mac from watching you. It simply is not one of those programs, and it has no manager view, no screenshots and no keystroke logging to turn on, which is the whole of what TimePrivate deliberately leaves out.
You already get a total from the employer's system. TimePrivate's calculator is the second opinion: type the week, compare the decimal figure against the payslip, and you know within a minute whether a break was deducted twice.
Billing a client means defending the number later. TimePrivate keeps the hours in a local database with CSV export, so the evidence behind an invoice is a file you hold rather than a report inside a subscription you might cancel. To attach a rate per client and get an invoice subtotal instead of a plain weekly total, use the TimePrivate billable hours calculator, and the TimePrivate comparison of freelance time tracking apps sets it against Toggl Track, Clockify and Harvest.
Nobody clocks you, so nothing gets counted. Run a week through the TimePrivate work hours calculator and the hours past 40 line stops being a feeling and starts being a number you can take into a review.
The TimePrivate work hours calculator on this page is plain HTML and JavaScript, so it runs in Edge, Chrome or Firefox on Windows and Linux exactly as it does on a Mac. The TimePrivate app itself ships on Apple Silicon Macs first, with Windows on the roadmap.
Employer workspaces close on your last day and take the history with them. A local TimePrivate database and a CSV file both survive the account being switched off, which is the practical reason to keep a parallel record while you are still employed.
TimePrivate has no team dashboard, no timesheet approvals and no payroll runs, so if you need to see other people's hours in one place this is the wrong work hours tracker. Clockify, Toggl and the rest of that market exist for that job.
These four come up again and again in the search results for work hours trackers, so here are straight answers, including the places TimePrivate is the wrong tool.
A good free work hours tracker totals a week correctly, exports what you typed, and does not need an account to do either. TimePrivate's free work hours calculator on this page clears that bar for a single week: unpaid breaks, overnight shifts, quarter hour rounding, the split past 40 hours, and a CSV download that never asks for an email. Free phone apps suit punching in and out on a job site better, so read the store privacy label first and see what each one collects before you hand it a year of shifts.
Tracking your hours for free needs three things: somewhere to write the clock times, arithmetic you trust, and a copy that outlives the job. TimePrivate covers all three at no cost with the work hours calculator on this page, a blank weekly timesheet template, and a CSV file you keep on your own machine, none of which require a sign-up. Only the automation is paid: the TimePrivate Mac app watches the week for you at a planned $9 a month or $79 a year, and it is not released yet.
There is no single best software for tracking work hours, because the answer splits by who the record is for. If other people's hours have to land in one dashboard with approvals, that is what Clockify, Toggl Track and the employer systems are built for, and TimePrivate is the wrong pick. If you want your own copy of your own hours, the useful shape is local: TimePrivate keeps the week in a database on your Mac with CSV export, no account and no manager view, so nobody can close the workspace and take your history with it.
Judge a free timesheet app on two questions: can you get the data out, and who else can read it. TimePrivate's free weekly timesheet template answers both in the browser, with a dated seven day grid, start, end, unpaid break and project columns, a CSV export and no account, and this page's calculator totals the week once it is filled in. Anything that can only print a report, or that keeps your history inside a workspace an administrator controls, is failing one of the two questions.
Both free TimePrivate tools mentioned here are one click away: the weekly timesheet template for the blank grid, and the TimePrivate billable hours calculator if the hours are going on an invoice rather than a payslip.
Six questions worth asking of any work hours tracker, TimePrivate included, before you type a month of your life into it.
A calculator answers today. A tracker answers "what did I bill Acme in Q2". If you need the second one, a bookmarked calculator will quietly cost you hours a month.
Look for CSV export before you type a single entry. Anything that can only print a report is holding your history hostage in a polite way.
Check whether there is an admin role at all. If a dashboard exists, someone can be given the keys to it later, whatever today's settings say.
With most cloud trackers the account closes and the history goes with it. Ask where the file lives. If the answer is "our servers", that is your answer.
Trains, planes, client sites with locked-down guest networks. A tracker that needs a connection to record a timer is a tracker that loses time.
Shift workers want punch in and punch out. Desk workers forget to start timers and need something automatic. Buying the wrong shape is the usual reason people quit a tracker in week two.
Where TimePrivate is the wrong pick: if you need one dashboard showing your team's hours, approval flows for other people's timesheets, or payroll runs for staff, look elsewhere. Those are the features it deliberately does not have. Same answer if you are on Windows or Linux today. Mac ships first.
Most work hours trackers reach you through an app store, and both stores now make the developer publish what the app collects. TimePrivate thinks that panel is the most useful thirty seconds of research you can do, so here is how to read it.
On an App Store listing it sits under the screenshots and splits into Data Linked to You, Data Used to Track You, and Data Not Linked to You. For a work hours tracker, the line that matters is whether your usage data and identifiers appear under Linked to You, because that is your timesheet tied to your name.
Play calls the same panel Data safety and adds two claims Apple does not: whether data is encrypted in transit, and whether you can request deletion. A work hours tracker that cannot answer the deletion question is one you should not hand a year of shifts to.
Both cards are self declared by the developer and describe collection, not retention. Neither says who inside the company can read your hours, or what happens to them when the company is acquired. That is why TimePrivate's answer is structural: an app that makes no network requests has nothing to declare in either panel.
Being straight about the split, because it is easy to blur: the TimePrivate Mac app makes no network requests, has no accounts and stores hours in a local database, so there is no collection to declare. This website is a different thing. timeprivate.com runs Google Analytics, PostHog and Microsoft Clarity, all named in the TimePrivate privacy page. The calculator table is marked as masked for those tools, so the shift times you type are not meant to appear in a session recording, and the totals are computed in your browser either way. An app that collects nothing sitting behind a site that measures its own traffic is the honest description, and you should expect any tracker you shortlist to draw that line as plainly.
The calculator on this page is a one week answer. The TimePrivate Mac app is the same work hours tracker running every day without being asked, in three moves.
Automatic tracking notices which apps you are in and which browser domains you visit, then maps them to projects using rules you write once. App names and domains, never screenshots and never keystrokes. Forget to start a timer and nothing is lost.
Each evening it drafts the timesheet from what it saw and hands it to you. Accept it, edit it, or throw it away. Nothing books itself into your week without you.
Hours land in a local database on your Mac. The app makes no network requests: no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reports, no account to create. Export the lot to CSV whenever you like, and if you want it on a second Mac, optional sync writes end to end encrypted files into a folder you choose. The rest of what the TimePrivate app does with those hours, from reports to offline invoices, sits on the home page.
Common questions about work hours trackers, the calculator on this page, and the TimePrivate Mac app.
A work hours tracker is any tool that records when you started work, when you stopped and which minutes were unpaid, then totals them across a week or a month. A browser calculator like the TimePrivate one on this page answers for a single week and forgets it when the tab closes. An app like TimePrivate keeps the history in a database, which is what lets you answer a question about March in June.
Divide the minutes by 60. 15 minutes is 0.25, 30 minutes is 0.50, 45 minutes is 0.75. So 7 hours 45 minutes is 7.75 hours, not 7.45. The calculator on this page shows both, because payroll almost always wants the decimal and you almost always think in minutes.
Yes. Download CSV under the table writes one row per day, with start, end, unpaid break, the worked total and the decimal figure, plus the weekly totals underneath. It opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets. TimePrivate builds the file inside your browser, so the times you typed are not sent to a server to produce it.
In everyday use the words are interchangeable, and the app stores list the same products under both. The distinction worth caring about is who the record belongs to. A timesheet app usually exists to hand hours to someone who approves them, so the workspace belongs to an employer or a client. TimePrivate is built for the copy you keep for yourself, which is why it has no manager view and no approval queue.
It depends where you work and what your contract says. The common pattern is that a long unpaid meal break comes out of the total while short paid breaks stay in. The calculator does not guess: it subtracts exactly the minutes you type in the break column, so enter the time you are not paid for.
Yes. The rounding menu above the table offers exact minutes, tenths of an hour, quarter hours and half hours, and TimePrivate rounds each day on its own after the unpaid break comes out. A 7h 52m day becomes 7h 45m on the quarter hour setting. Total the same week both ways to see which direction your employer's rounding runs.
Type an hourly rate into the optional pay field and TimePrivate prices the week: regular hours at your rate, hours past 40 at 1.5 times it, and both added into an estimated gross. It is currency neutral, it happens in your browser, and it is before tax, deductions, shift premiums and anything else your payslip does, so use it as a rough check rather than a prediction of the amount that lands in your account.
Yes. If the end time is earlier than the start time, it treats the shift as crossing midnight and adds the missing hours. A 22:00 start and a 06:00 end reads as eight hours.
Nothing stops you keeping your own log alongside whatever system your employer uses, and the Department of Labor publishes a timesheet app aimed at exactly that. In TimePrivate your copy is a local database plus CSV export, so the record is a file you hold rather than a row in someone else's account.
No. It is not released, so there is nothing to download and nothing to pay for today. The waitlist is the whole offer: one email the day it opens. The planned pricing is $9 a month or $79 a year, subscription only.
It has no online mode to lose. The app makes no network requests at all, so tracking on a plane behaves exactly like tracking at your desk. Optional sync is the one thing that touches a folder, and it writes end to end encrypted files your cloud provider cannot read.
Not yet. Mac ships first, on Apple Silicon, and Windows is on the roadmap. The calculator on this page runs in any browser on any operating system.
TimePrivate's work hours calculator is free and stays that way, so use it every payday if you like. When you want the same totals to appear without you typing anything, the TimePrivate Mac app is what the waitlist is for. One email the day it opens, nothing else.
Not released yet. Leave your email and we will write to you the day it opens.