A six-minute increment time sheet records your work in tenths of an hour: every six minutes of clock time becomes 0.1, so ten blocks fill an hour. A 14-minute task logs as 0.3; a 42-minute task logs as 0.7. Law firms, accounting practices, and government contractors use this format because the decimals multiply cleanly against an hourly rate with no fraction math.
The Minute-to-Decimal Chart
Each six-minute range gets the same decimal value, and any time falling inside the range rounds up to that value.1United States District Court. Billing Increment Chart – Minutes to Tenths of an Hour A one-minute call and a six-minute call both record as 0.1.
- 1–6 minutes: 0.1 hour
- 7–12 minutes: 0.2 hour
- 13–18 minutes: 0.3 hour
- 19–24 minutes: 0.4 hour
- 25–30 minutes: 0.5 hour
- 31–36 minutes: 0.6 hour
- 37–42 minutes: 0.7 hour
- 43–48 minutes: 0.8 hour
- 49–54 minutes: 0.9 hour
- 55–60 minutes: 1.0 hour
Payroll and billing software multiply the decimal directly by your rate. Log 7.4 hours at $30 and the math is $30 × 7.4 = $222. That is the whole point of the format.
Billing Rounding Is Not Payroll Rounding
How you apply the chart depends on what the time sheet is for. Mixing the two sets of rules is where most problems start.
For client billing, which is standard in legal and consulting work, you round each individual task up to the next 0.1. A two-minute email becomes 0.1. A seven-minute call becomes 0.2. Professional responsibility rules expect these entries to stay reasonable; logging two separate five-minute calls inside the same six-minute window as two 0.1-hour entries drifts from standard practice into padding.
For payroll and wages, you do not round every task. You round the clock-in and clock-out times to the nearest tenth of an hour, and the rounding has to work both directions. Clocking in at 8:02 rounds back to 8:00, which helps the worker. Clocking in at 8:04 rounds forward to 8:06, which helps the employer. The split falls at the three-minute midpoint of each block.
The short version: billing rounds each task up; payroll rounds clock punches to the nearest tenth and has to balance out.
Federal Rules for Rounding Clock Times
The rule on employee time rounding is 29 C.F.R. § 785.48. The regulation accepts that employers often record start and stop times to the nearest five minutes, tenth of an hour, or quarter hour, and allows the practice as long as rounding does not consistently shortchange employees.2eCFR. 29 CFR 785.48 – Use of Time Clocks
The standard is that rounding must not result, over a period of time, in a failure to pay employees for all the time they actually worked.2eCFR. 29 CFR 785.48 – Use of Time Clocks Some punches add a minute, others shave one off, and across weeks and months the differences should wash out. A policy that tilts systematically toward the employer violates the rule even if the interval looks ordinary. Courts have treated the neutrality requirement seriously: in one federal appellate case, employees showed that a hospital’s rounding policy clipped minutes from workers two-thirds of the time, and that pattern was enough to send the case to trial.
What Belongs on the Time Sheet
Federal law requires employers to track hours worked each day, total hours each workweek, the regular pay rate, and total earnings per pay period for each non-exempt employee.3eCFR. 29 CFR 516.2 – Employees Subject to Minimum Wage or Minimum Wage and Overtime Pay A properly completed six-minute time sheet carries:
- The calendar date for each entry.
- Raw start and stop times, kept alongside the decimals so a rounding dispute can be reconstructed later.
- A task description with enough detail to answer a billing question or audit.
- A task or project code where the employer uses one. Legal practices often draw from the Uniform Task-Based Management System to sort work by activity type like research, drafting, or client communication.
- The converted decimal value, 0.1 through 1.0, for each task.
- A billable or non-billable flag if the employer separates client work from internal time.
A common and avoidable error is recording only the decimal and never writing down the actual minutes. If an entry shows “0.3” with no underlying 14-minute note, the conversion cannot be verified. Jot clock times down as you switch tasks through the day and convert all at once before you submit.
Non-Billable Work and Travel
Blocks that do not go to a client still belong on the sheet when the employer wants a full accounting of the day. Internal meetings, administration, email, and planning all get recorded; the billable/non-billable split is how firms see overhead and utilization. Timekeepers who log only billable hours and leave gaps tend to get questions about where the rest of the day went.
Travel runs on its own rule. An ordinary home-to-office commute is not compensable and stays off the sheet. Travel between job sites during the workday counts as hours worked and goes on the sheet like any other task.4U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 22 – Hours Worked Under the Fair Labor Standards Act A drive from the main office to a client site across town converts to decimal hours like anything else.
Overtime With Decimal Hours
Decimal hours make the overtime math simple. Add the week’s entries. Under the FLSA, non-exempt time beyond 40.0 hours in the workweek pays at 1.5 times the regular rate.
Say the week totals 43.5 hours at $25 per hour. Forty hours at $25 is $1,000. The 3.5 overtime hours at $37.50 come to $131.25. Gross for the week: $1,131.25.
Watch the 40-hour line when the employer rounds punches. A few minutes rounded away on a Friday can push the week from 40.0 to 39.9 and cost the overtime premium entirely. That is one more reason the neutrality of rounding matters: it reaches past daily pay into whether overtime starts at all.
How Long Records Have to Be Kept
Federal law sets two retention tiers. Basic payroll records, including the data your time sheets feed, must be preserved for at least three years. Supplemental records used to compute wages, such as time cards, work schedules, and the conversion tables behind the decimals, must be kept for at least two years.5U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 21 – Recordkeeping Requirements Under the Fair Labor Standards Act
Those are federal floors. Many states require longer, and government contractors often face retention periods well past three years. If you are the employee, keep your own copies of submitted sheets. A screenshot or PDF of each submission takes seconds, and under the FLSA you have two years to file a claim for unpaid wages, or three years if the violation was willful.6Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 255 – Statute of Limitations Within that window, your personal copies may be the strongest evidence of what you actually worked.