Free Weekly Timesheet Template for Excel and Google Sheets (2026)
Search for a free timesheet template and you'll get a few hundred of them, nearly all published by a time tracking company that would rather sell you a subscription. Most are the same thing: a grid of seven days with a SUM at the bottom. That tells you that you worked 38 hours last week. It doesn't tell you which of those hours you can put on an invoice, or what they're worth, which for anyone billing by the hour is the number that actually matters.
So ours has rates and a billable column in it, and it adds up what you're owed. Download it below. There's no email address to hand over and no watermark on the thing. Then read the rest, because the parts of timesheet keeping that go wrong are rarely the parts a template can fix.
Download the template
One file, 25 rows, Monday to Sunday, and it opens in Excel or Google Sheets. Nothing is locked and nothing phones home. Change the columns, delete our name off it, use it for the next ten years.
Download the free weekly timesheet (.xlsx)
For Google Sheets, go to File, then Import, then Upload, and choose Replace spreadsheet. The formulas and the Yes/No dropdown come across intact. If you'd rather print it and fill it in with a pen, that works too; the sheet fits a portrait page without fighting you about margins.
The columns, and why each one is there
Every column earns its place. A timesheet with fourteen columns gets abandoned by Wednesday.
- Date, client, project or task. The three things you'll want to filter or group by when a client queries an invoice four months from now.
- What you did. A short line in plain language. This is the column that saves you in a dispute, and the one people leave blank.
- Start, end and break. Times in 24-hour form, break in minutes. Hours works itself out from these, so you're never doing arithmetic in your head at 6pm.
- Billable and rate. Yes or No from a dropdown, and the hourly rate for that piece of work. Value fills in on its own.
At the bottom you get total hours, billable hours, non-billable hours, the amount to invoice, and your utilization for the week. That last figure is billable hours as a share of everything you worked, and it's usually a nastier number than people expect. If it's the first time you've measured it, our guide to billable versus non-billable hours explains what to do with the answer.
How to use it
Five minutes on Monday, thirty seconds a few times a day, done.
1. Set the week commencing date
Put the Monday's date in the box at the top and save the file under that date, something like
Timesheet 2026-08-10.xlsx. One file per week beats one giant file per year, because
a giant file is where formula ranges quietly stop covering the rows you added.
2. Add a row per block of work, as it happens
Not per day, per block. If you spent the morning on one client and the afternoon on another, that's two rows. Fill them in when you stop, or at the end of the day at the latest. The gap between doing work and recording it is where billable time goes missing, and it goes missing in one direction only.
3. Mark billable and set the rate
Pick Yes or No in the Billable column and type the hourly rate for that work, say £75 for one client and £90 for another. Value calculates immediately, and because the rate lives on the row, two clients at different rates coexist happily in one week. Non-billable rows still belong on the sheet with a No against them; admin, quoting, your own bookkeeping and the hour you lost to a broken deployment are all real hours, and hiding them makes your utilization figure a fiction.
4. Check the totals on Friday
Look at the block at the bottom before you close the file. Total hours you recognize? Billable hours roughly where you expected? A week that reads 12 billable hours out of 40 is telling you something, and it's better to hear it now than in three months when the bank balance says it louder.
5. Invoice from it, then keep it
The billable total by client is your invoice. Attach the sheet if the client likes detail, or just quote the hours. Then keep the file. Our guide to invoicing for hourly work covers what the invoice itself needs, and how to set terms that get it paid.
The formulas, including the one everyone gets wrong
You don't need to touch these, but it's worth knowing what they do so you can change the sheet without breaking it.
Hours is MOD(End - Start, 1) * 24 - Break / 60. The
MOD is there so a shift that runs from 22:00 to 02:00 comes out as four hours
instead of minus twenty. Overnight work breaks more spreadsheets than any other single thing.
Billable hours is a SUMIF over the Yes/No column, and
Value multiplies hours by rate only when the row says Yes, so a rate typed into
a non-billable row can't leak into the invoice total.
And the one that catches people. Excel stores a time as a fraction of a day, so if you format
your weekly total as a time, 31.5 hours displays as 7:30. The hours haven't gone anywhere; the
clock has wrapped around midnight and the display is lying to you. Microsoft's fix is the custom
format [h]:mm, where the square brackets tell Excel to keep counting past 24. Our
template sidesteps the whole thing by storing hours as plain decimal numbers, so 31.5 stays 31.5
and multiplying by a rate does what you'd expect. One hour thirty is 1.5, not 1.30.
Rounding, and what US law allows
Most people round somewhere. If you're a freelancer billing your own clients, rounding is between you and your contract, and the only real rule is to round consistently and be able to explain it. Rounding every 50-minute call up to an hour is a pricing decision, so make it deliberately.
If you're an employer using this template for staff, the rules are firmer. Under 29 CFR 785.48, the FLSA permits rounding start and stop times to the nearest five minutes, tenth of an hour or quarter hour, as long as it doesn't shortchange employees over time. The familiar version is the seven-minute rule: with quarter-hour rounding, one to seven minutes rounds down and eight to fourteen rounds up. The catch is neutrality. Round down every time and you're in violation, no matter how small each individual shave is. State law can be stricter, and California courts have been narrowing when rounding is acceptable at all where exact times could have been captured, so check your state before you adopt a policy.
Retention matters too. The Department of Labor's Fact Sheet #21 asks employers to keep payroll records for three years and the underlying time cards for two. Freelancers aren't covered by that, but keeping several years of timesheets is still the cheapest insurance there is against a client who suddenly remembers the project differently.
Where a spreadsheet stops working
We give the template away because it's genuinely useful, and it's worth being straight about when it stops being enough.
Mostly it stops working because of memory. A template can't remind you that you took a 20 minute call on Tuesday afternoon. Come Friday you're reconstructing the week from your inbox, your sent folder and a feeling, and the hours you can't quite place tend to get written off rather than billed. That's real money leaving through a gap the spreadsheet can't see.
Then there's the repetition. Fifty-two files a year, each one a copy of the last, with the rates retyped every time. Change a client's rate and every older file still holds the old one, which is correct history but a nuisance when you want a quarter's figures.
And everything after the week ends is on you. Totaling by client across three months, working out what you've invoiced against what you haven't, chasing what's overdue. A spreadsheet will do all of it if you're willing to build it, and building it is a hobby.
The faster way: let your calendar fill it in
Here's the thing about that Tuesday call. It was already in your calendar, with a start time, an end time and the client's name on it. Your calendar has been keeping a rough timesheet for you the whole time; nobody has been reading it.
VibaCloud connects to Outlook or Google Calendar, pulls the week's events in, and turns them into a draft weekly timesheet with the real durations already filled. You tag each entry to a client and project, mark what's billable, and the hours and their value total up as you go. Every project carries its own rate, so you set it once instead of retyping it into 52 files. Any week exports to Excel or PDF, and the billable time turns into a numbered invoice you can track from sent to paid. It's free, with no card and no seat limit.
What changes is where you start. You're editing a record that's already mostly right instead of facing an empty grid and trying to remember. If most of your week happens in your Outlook calendar or your Google calendar, you're already most of the way to a finished timesheet.
The bottom line
Use the template. It costs nothing and it's yours, and a plain spreadsheet you keep up with will serve you better than a clever system you stop opening in March. The one thing to watch is the Friday reconstruction habit, because that's where hours quietly go missing, and switching templates has never once fixed it.
Frequently asked questions
Is the timesheet template really free?
Yes. There's no account to create and no watermark on it. Download it, change the columns, put your own name on it, and keep using it for as long as it's useful.
Does the template work in Google Sheets?
Yes. In Google Sheets choose File, then Import, then Upload, and pick Replace spreadsheet. The formulas and the Yes/No billable dropdown survive the import.
Why are the hours decimal instead of 9:30?
Because Excel stores a time as a fraction of a day, so a weekly total formatted as a time wraps at 24 hours and displays 31.5 hours as 7:30. Decimal hours avoid that entirely and multiply cleanly by an hourly rate. One hour thirty is 1.5.
Can I use a timesheet template for payroll?
For a small team, yes, as long as the hours are accurate and you keep the records. The US Department of Labor asks employers to keep payroll records three years and time cards two. Any rounding has to be neutral over time under 29 CFR 785.48, and some states are stricter.
When is a spreadsheet no longer worth it?
When you're reconstructing the week on Friday rather than recording it as you go, or when you're retyping the same rates into a new file every week. At that point a tool that builds the timesheet from your calendar saves both the typing and the hours you'd otherwise forget.
