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The unpaid lunch and the 40-hour line are where paychecks drift.
8:30 to 5:00 with a 30-minute unpaid lunch is 8.0 hours, not 8.5 — five days of that is exactly 40.0 hours and $980 at $24.50. This timesheet nets the breaks, counts the days, and prices overtime past 40 the federal way.
Workers use it on Sunday night: 8:30–5:00 minus the lunch is exactly 8.0 hrs — 40.0 a week, $980 at $24.50, and the OT line is where the money hides.
Convert clock times to decimal hours first: 8:30 AM is 8.5, 1:15 PM is 13.25 (minutes ÷ 60, so :15 = .25, :30 = .5, :45 = .75). Subtract start from end, subtract unpaid breaks, and that is the day. Five shifts of 8:30–5:00 with a 30-minute lunch = (17 − 8.5 − 0.5) × 5 = 40.0 hours exactly. Common gotchas: paid breaks (under 20 minutes must be paid under federal law) stay IN the total, unpaid meal periods (typically 30+ minutes, relieved of all duties) come OUT, and rounding policies — many payroll systems round to the nearest 6 or 15 minutes — can shift a week by half an hour either way.
Federal law (FLSA): past 40 hours in a workweek, non-exempt hourly workers earn 1.5× their regular rate — daily hours do not trigger federal OT, so a 12-hour day inside a 38-hour week is straight time. State rules add layers: California pays 1.5× past 8 hours in a DAY and double-time past 12; Colorado, Nevada, and Alaska have their own daily thresholds. The regular rate can also be more than base pay — non-discretionary bonuses and shift differentials must be folded in before the 1.5× is computed. A 43-hour week at $24.50 is 40 × $24.50 + 3 × $36.75 = $1,090.25 gross.
Five usual suspects, in order: unpaid meal breaks (a 30-minute lunch across 5 days is 2.5 hours — the difference between 42.5 scheduled and 40.0 paid), employer rounding to the quarter-hour, overtime computed on a different workweek than you assumed (the workweek is fixed by the employer and need not start Monday), pre-tax deductions shrinking the NET while gross stays right (401k, health premiums), and premium pay rules — shift differentials, on-call, or holiday rates stacking differently than mental math. The diagnostic: divide gross pay by hours on the stub and compare to your rate line by line. If the ratio is off by a consistent half hour a day, it is the lunch.