Timesheet rounding and the 7-minute rule
Rounding punch times is legal — but only if it is genuinely neutral. Here is the rule, the tables, and how to tell whether yours is costing you money.
Rounding punch times is legal — but only if it is genuinely neutral. Here is the rule, the tables, and how to tell whether yours is costing you money.
General information, not legal advice. Rounding is an active area of litigation and state rules diverge from the federal position. Check current law for your state before relying on any of this.
Rounding means paying you for a tidied-up version of your punches rather than the exact minute. A shift clocked at 8:57 to 17:04 might be paid as 9:00 to 17:00. It exists because payroll systems and paper timesheets were historically built around quarter hours, and it has survived into systems that no longer need it.
Federal law permits it. 29 CFR § 785.48(b) allows an employer to round to the nearest 5 minutes, tenth of an hour (6 minutes) or quarter hour (15 minutes) — provided the practice "will not result, over a period of time, in failure to compensate the employees properly for all the time they have actually worked."
That proviso is the whole rule. Rounding has to be neutral: it must cut both ways and roughly balance out. A policy that only ever rounds against the employee is unlawful even if each individual adjustment is small.
With quarter-hour rounding, the midpoint of each 15-minute block is 7½ minutes, which produces the familiar table:
| Minutes past | Result | Minutes past | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 min | rounds down (unpaid) → :00 | 8 min | rounds up (paid) → :15 |
| 1 min | rounds down (unpaid) → :00 | 9 min | rounds up (paid) → :15 |
| 2 min | rounds down (unpaid) → :00 | 10 min | rounds up (paid) → :15 |
| 3 min | rounds down (unpaid) → :00 | 11 min | rounds up (paid) → :15 |
| 4 min | rounds down (unpaid) → :00 | 12 min | rounds up (paid) → :15 |
| 5 min | rounds down (unpaid) → :00 | 13 min | rounds up (paid) → :15 |
| 6 min | rounds down (unpaid) → :00 | 14 min | rounds up (paid) → :15 |
| 7 min | rounds down (unpaid) → :00 |
Measured from the quarter-hour markers, 1 to 7 minutes past a marker rounds back to it, and 8 to 14 minutes past rounds forward to the next one. Clock in at 8:52 and you are paid from 8:45; clock in at 8:53 and you are paid from 9:00.
The rule is often misquoted as "you can be up to 7 minutes late without losing pay." That is backwards. Being 7 minutes late means your time rounds down to the previous quarter, so those minutes are unpaid — but you are also not docked a full quarter hour. The employee benefit runs the other way: arriving 8 minutes early gets you paid from the earlier quarter.
| Increment | Break point | Max swing per punch | Typical user |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 minutes | 2½ minutes | ±2.5 min | Retail, hospitality |
| 6 minutes (0.1 h) | 3 minutes | ±3 min | Professional services, legal billing |
| 15 minutes (0.25 h) | 7½ minutes | ±7.5 min | Manufacturing, traditional payroll |
With two punches a day and quarter-hour rounding, a worst-case day swings 15 minutes. Across 250 working days that is more than 62 hours — which is why neutrality matters so much more than the size of any single adjustment.
The practical trend is clear: as timekeeping systems record to the second, the historical justification for rounding — administrative convenience — disappears, and with it the legal cover.
The time card calculator does the same for a single day if you only want to check one shift.
Yes under federal law. 29 CFR 785.48(b) permits rounding to the nearest quarter hour provided it is neutral and does not, over time, fail to compensate employees for all time worked. Some states now restrict it further.
No. Rounding must work in both directions. A policy that consistently rounds against the employee fails the neutrality requirement even if each adjustment is only a few minutes.
With quarter-hour rounding the worst case is 7½ minutes per punch, so 15 minutes a day. Over a working year that is more than 62 hours — but a lawful, neutral policy should return roughly as much as it takes.
Rounding to 6-minute blocks, so every result lands on 0.1 of an hour. The break point is 3 minutes: 1–3 minutes round down, 4–6 round up.
It is under increasing pressure. The Court of Appeal in Camp v. Home Depot held that where an employer's system captures the exact minutes worked, the employer must pay for all of that time; the California Supreme Court granted review. Many California employers have stopped rounding as a result.
That is far harder to defend. The regulation contemplates rounding of clock-in and clock-out times, not of accumulated totals, and rounding a weekly figure tends to produce larger one-sided adjustments.
Rounding cannot be used to extend an unpaid break beyond its actual length, and time spent working through a break is payable regardless of what the punches say.
A full week with breaks, overtime, saving and export.
One day, clocked in and out up to three times.
Why overtime is rarely just 1.5× your hourly wage.
Federal rules plus the states that add daily or lower thresholds.
The 0–59 minute payroll conversion chart.