Construction time cards are the daily record of when each worker on the crew started, when they stopped, and what came off in between, and they exist so the week can be added up and paid without an argument. A card that is doing its job carries the name, the date, the start and finish for the day, the unpaid break, the job or cost code the hours sit against, and the daily total in decimal hours rather than in hours and minutes. Everything else on the card is optional. What matters is that Friday's adding uses figures the tool can multiply by a rate, that nobody is deducting the same lunch twice, and that the sheet is signed by the person who worked it and the person who checked it. The free construction crew time card on this site holds a week for the whole crew, takes the breaks off, converts the minutes and totals each person before it splits the hours at 40. Print it for signature, or save the week to the paid product and the card stops living in a truck.
What belongs on time cards for construction workers
Name, date, start, finish, unpaid break, job, daily decimal total, and a signature line for the worker and the foreman. The decimal total is the part crews leave off and the part payroll needs, because 8 hours 15 minutes cannot be multiplied by a wage rate until it is written as 8.25. Give every day its own line rather than a week's lump total, since a daily figure is what a later question is answered with and a weekly lump is only ever an assertion. Where a job number or cost code drives the bid, put it beside the hours on the day they were worked, not at the top of the sheet.
Paper or electronic time cards for construction: what actually changes
A paper card and a digital card record the same six figures; the difference is who does the adding and where the card ends up. Paper travels to the trailer, gets rained on, and is added by hand on Friday, which is where the conversion errors enter. A digital card is filled on a phone or in a browser, converts the minutes as the times are entered, totals each worker before Friday and is legible a year later. Neither is more legal than the other. Choose the one that makes the week's figures reliable and keeps them findable, because a card nobody can produce later is a card that was never worth filling in.
Rounding, and the quarter hour rule
An employer may round recorded times to the nearest quarter hour under the practice described in 29 CFR 785.48, provided the rounding is neutral over time and does not, on average, work out in the employer's favor. Practically that means rounding both ways to the nearest quarter mark, with the midpoint of each quarter falling seven minutes either side. A card showing 6:53 rounds up to 7:00, because 6:53 is seven minutes short of the hour and eight minutes past the previous quarter. A finish written at 3:22 rounds down to 3:15 for the same reason. Rounding always in the same direction is not this rule and does not survive a look at the sheets.
One card, turned into pay
Take the day rounded above. Start 7:00, finish 3:15, half hour unpaid lunch: 8 hours 15 minutes on the card, less 30 minutes, is 7 hours 45 minutes, or 7.75 decimal hours. Suppose the other four days give 8.5, 8.5, 8.25 and 8.5 hours, so the week is 41.5 hours. At 26 dollars an hour, the first 40 hours are 1,040 dollars of regular pay. The 1.5 hours over 40 are paid at one and a half times 26 dollars, which is 39 dollars an hour, so 58.50 dollars of overtime pay. The card owes 1,098.50 dollars gross. Every figure in that line came off the card, which is the test of whether the card was filled in properly.
A time card system is the keeping, not the filling
Filling a card in takes a minute a day. Keeping it takes a year. Federal recordkeeping asks an employer to hold, for each nonexempt worker, the hours worked each day and the total for each workweek, together with the pay basis and the regular hourly rate, and to keep payroll records for three years. So the useful part of a system is the file, not the form: the week saved against the employee and the pay period, the times as they were entered, the rounding visible, the decimal totals beside them, and the signed sheet attached. That is what the subscription on this site does with each week the crew card produces.
Questions people ask about construction time cards
Do construction time cards have to be signed?
No federal rule requires a signature, but a signed card settles later disputes about the week faster than any other document, so most crews have the worker and the foreman sign each sheet.
Can hours be recorded to the exact minute instead of rounding?
Yes, and exact minutes are the simplest defensible practice. Rounding is permitted rather than required, so if your card carries real times, convert them and pay them as they stand.
Are digital time cards acceptable as the record?
Yes. The rules ask for the hours worked each day and each workweek and for the records to be kept and produced, not for a particular medium, so an electronic card kept properly qualifies.
How long should the cards be kept?
Payroll records, including the daily and weekly hours behind them, are kept for three years under the federal recordkeeping requirement, so a week's cards outlive the pay run by a long way.