Work hours & pay
Billable hours calculator
Enter when you started and stopped work, your billing increment and hourly rate to see the billable hours and fee.
Each entry rounds up to the next whole increment, the standard convention for time-based billing.
How billable time is rounded
Time-based billing rarely charges to the exact minute. Instead, firms set a minimum increment and round each entry up to the next whole unit. The calculator finds the actual minutes worked, divides by the increment, rounds up to a whole number of units, then multiplies the billed time by your hourly rate. The 6-minute unit is the most common because it divides an hour into ten tenths, so each unit is 0.1 of an hour and the maths is clean. Work from 9:00 to 11:40 is 160 minutes; in 6-minute units that is 27 units, or 2.7 hours, and at $150 an hour the fee is $405. Rounding up added 2 minutes over the exact time.
Smaller increments track effort more closely; larger ones round more aggressively and favour the person billing. The table shows how the same 160 minutes bills under each option.
| Increment | Units for 160 min | Billable hours | Fee at $150 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 min | 27 | 2.70 | $405 |
| 10 min | 16 | 2.67 | $400 |
| 15 min | 11 | 2.75 | $412.50 |
Billing fairly and accurately
Rounding up is standard and defensible for a single block of work, but it compounds. A lawyer who logs twenty short calls in a day, each rounded up from two minutes to a 6-minute unit, bills far more than the time actually spent. The fix is to group related short tasks into one timed entry rather than rounding each separately, which many bar associations and client billing guidelines expect. The "added by rounding" figure here shows how much a single entry inflates, so you can judge whether it is reasonable.
Keep your own contemporaneous record of start and stop times rather than reconstructing the day from memory, which tends to overstate. If your engagement letter specifies an increment, match it exactly, and note that some clients cap or disallow rounding altogether and require billing to the minute. For internal cost tracking rather than client invoices, you may prefer to bill the exact time and skip rounding, since the inflation that protects a fee is just noise in a budget.
Frequently asked questions
What is a billing increment?
It is the smallest block of time you charge for. With a 6-minute increment, any entry rounds up to the next tenth of an hour, so three minutes of work bills as 0.1 hours.
Why do lawyers bill in 6-minute increments?
Six minutes is one tenth of an hour, so each unit equals 0.1 hours and converting time to a fee is simple. It is the most common standard in legal and professional-services billing.
Is rounding billable time up legal?
Rounding each entry up to a set increment is widely accepted, but inflating totals by rounding many tiny tasks separately can breach billing guidelines. Group short related tasks into one entry to stay fair.