Free UK timesheet template: weekly and monthly examples for managers

Rotas tell you who was supposed to be in. Timesheets tell you who actually was. If you pay people by the hour, that gap is the difference between correct payroll and a run of small errors that quietly compound across a team and a year.

Download the free timesheet template

Our free staff timesheet template is an Excel file. No formulas to build, no formatting faff.

Here is what is in it:

• One sheet per person. Enter the pay period start date, the person's name and their employee number at the top, and the dates populate themselves.
• A row for each day across a two-week pay period, with columns for clock in, clock out and unpaid break in HH:MM format.
• Two overtime thresholds. A daily limit (8 hours by default) and a weekly limit (40 hours by default). Both are editable, so set them to match your contracts.
• Automatic totals. Regular hours, overtime and total hours calculate as you type.
• An "approved by" field so a manager signs the period off before it goes to payroll.

To add another person, right-click the tab and duplicate it. To cover a full month, duplicate the sheet and move the start date on.

What a weekly timesheet looks like

Here is a filled-in week for a full-time employee, with a daily overtime threshold of 8 hours.

Read Tuesday closely, because it is where most manual timesheets go wrong. Nine hours between clock in and clock out, minus a 30 minute unpaid break, gives 8.5 hours worked. The first 8 are regular and the remaining 0.5 is overtime, because the daily threshold was crossed. Total paid hours for the week: 38.5.

Wednesday is the one to watch for a different reason: an eight-hour span, but only 7.5 hours worked once the break comes off, so no overtime despite looking like a full day. A 12:00 start and a 20:00 finish is a perfectly normal shift, and it will trip up anyone doing the sums in their head at 5pm on a Friday.

What a monthly timesheet looks like

A monthly timesheet is usually a roll-up of the weeks rather than a single 30 row grid. Same data, summarised for payroll.

At the National Living Wage of £12.71 an hour, which applies to workers aged 21 and over from 1 April 2026, that month is £2,135.28 in regular pay. Add overtime at time and a half, if that's what you pay, and it is £47.66 more.

That "if" is doing a lot of work. There is no statutory overtime rate in the UK. Employers do not have to pay a premium for extra hours at all, and any rate you do pay comes from the contract, not the law. The one legal floor is that average pay across all the hours someone worked must not fall below the minimum wage. Which is why the total hours column has to be right: keep the pay the same and add the hours, and the average is what quietly slips.

Two and a half hours of overtime across a month sounds like a rounding error. Across ten people it is 25 hours, and across a year it is 300. Worth getting right.

If you are trying to sanity check a monthly figure, our breakdown of how many hours are in a working month has the reference numbers.

What should a UK timesheet include?

A UK timesheet needs enough detail to reconstruct what someone was paid and why. At minimum: the person's name, the pay period dates, daily start and finish times, unpaid break duration, daily and period totals, a split between regular and overtime hours, and a manager's approval.

Two additions earn their place for shift-based teams:

• Night hours flagged separately. Night workers have their own limits under the Working Time Regulations, and you will want to see those hours without recalculating them.
• Absence codes. Marking a day as holiday or sick rather than leaving it blank means a blank always means "not scheduled". Ambiguity in a timesheet is how disputes start.

What a timesheet does not need is a task-by-task breakdown. That is project time tracking, and it is a different job.

How long do you have to keep timesheets in the UK?

Keep timesheets for six years. National Minimum Wage records must be retained for six years, up from three, for records made from 1 April 2021 onwards. Working Time Regulations records only need two years, so six years covers both.

There is a format requirement worth knowing about. NMW records have to be kept in a form that lets you produce the information for a single worker, for a single pay reference period, as one document. A shared drive full of unnamed spreadsheets is not that.

The Fair Work Agency launched on 7 April 2026 as a single enforcement body for employment rights, and minimum wage compliance is already in its remit. Statutory holiday pay enforcement follows in 2027. The government's own list of actions for employers includes reviewing your record keeping and making sure you can show you are meeting your legal obligations

Do you have to record every hour your team works?

No. ACAS is clear that an employer does not need to keep records of all daily working hours. What the Working Time Regulations 1998 require is records adequate to show four things: that nobody exceeds the 48-hour weekly maximum, averaged over 17 weeks; who has signed an opt-out; that night work limits are met and health assessments have been offered to night workers; and that young workers, meaning anyone over school leaving age and under 18, are not working during the restricted night-time period.

Which is where the night hours column earns its place. If night hours are buried in the daily totals, you cannot show the night limits were met without rebuilding the whole period by hand, and the health assessment sits in a folder nobody connects to the timesheet.

But minimum wage is a separate obligation, and a stricter one in practice. If someone is paid at or near the National Living Wage, you need to be able to demonstrate they were paid for the time they actually worked. The government's own guidance to employers points out that you can be paying the right hourly rate and still underpay, simply by not paying for all time worked.

So the honest answer to 'do I need timesheets?' is that no law uses the word, but a timesheet is the simplest way to satisfy both sets of records at once.

Where a spreadsheet timesheet starts to creak

The template does the job for a small team on a stable pattern. The faff starts when you scale.

One sheet per person means fifteen tabs for fifteen people, and fifteen chances for someone to type 08:00 where they meant 18:00. You are chasing completed sheets at the end of every period. Nobody can prove when a time was entered, so a disputed hour becomes one person's memory against another's. And the timesheet is disconnected from the rota you built, which means comparing scheduled hours against actual hours is a manual job you will stop doing by week three.

That is the point at which a clock beats a spreadsheet. Timetastic Rota & Time Clock lets your team clock in from a phone, tablet or shared computer, ties every clock-in to their shift on the rota, and builds the timesheet as they go. Leave, rotas and attendance sit in one place, so the hours you pay are the hours the record shows.

If you are weighing up options, we have compared the time tracking tools UK teams actually use, including the free ones.

And if the rota itself is the messier half of the problem, start with our free weekly rota template or our guide to building a rota that works.

Start your free 30-day trial, no credit card required.

FAQ

Are timesheets a legal requirement in the UK?

No single law requires timesheets by name, but you must be able to evidence minimum wage compliance and working time limits, and timesheets are the standard way to do it. Without records, you have no defence if a worker's pay is queried.

Can employees fill in their own timesheets?

Yes. Self-reported hours are normal and lawful, provided a manager reviews and approves them before payroll. The approval step is what turns a claim into a record, which is why the template includes an "approved by" field.

How do you convert hours and minutes into decimals on a timesheet?

Divide the minutes by 60. So 30 minutes is 0.50, 15 minutes is 0.25, and 20 minutes is 0.33. Mixing formats is the most common timesheet error: 7.30 is seven hours and eighteen minutes, not seven and a half.

Should unpaid breaks be deducted from the timesheet total?

Yes, unpaid breaks come off the total hours worked. Workers are entitled to an uninterrupted 20 minute break when their working day is longer than six hours, and whether that break is paid depends on their contract, not on the law.

Can you round timesheet hours up or down?

Rounding is risky, because you have to pay for the time actually worked. Rounding a 09:07 start forward to 09:15 shaves eight minutes off someone's pay, and repeated across a period it can push a minimum wage worker below the legal rate.

What is the difference between a rota and a timesheet?

A rota is the schedule published in advance; a timesheet is the record of the hours actually worked, approved afterwards. Payroll runs on the timesheet.

The distinction matters when they disagree, which is most weeks. The timesheet is the document you have to be able to produce for a single worker and a single pay period, so it is the one that carries the compliance weight. The rota is the thing you fix next week once the timesheet shows you where the pattern was wrong.