How to round time to the nearest 15 minutes
✓ Verified in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3Snap clock-in/clock-out or log times to the nearest quarter hour for billing and timesheets.
The formula
| App | Formula | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Excel | =MROUND(A2,TIME(0,15,0)) | CEILING/FLOOR with TIME(0,15,0) round strictly up or down instead. |
| Google Sheets | =MROUND(A2,TIME(0,15,0)) | Identical. |
| LibreOffice Calc | =MROUND(A2,TIME(0,15,0)) | Identical. |
How it works
Times are day-fractions, so MROUND with a 15-minute step (TIME(0,15,0)) snaps to the nearest quarter hour: 9:07 is closer to 9:00 than 9:15, so it rounds down; 9:08 would round up. Billing that always rounds in one direction uses CEILING (up) or FLOOR (down) with the same step — and the step is arbitrary: TIME(0,6,0) gives tenth-of-an-hour rounding.
Verified, not just documented
We ran =TEXT(MROUND(TIME(9,7,0),TIME(0,15,0)),"H:MM") in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 (headless, with forced recalculation) and it returned 9:00 — exactly the expected result. Every formula here is confirmed by actually executing it.