How it worksThe planPricingFAQSign in
Decisions and tools

How to track your volunteer hours

Updated September 7, 2026

Record four things every time: the date, the organisation, the hours, and one line on what you actually did. Get a supervisor's name and contact for anything that may need verifying — graduation requirements, scholarships and honour societies frequently do. Do it as it happens rather than at the end, because the thing that makes a record valuable is the specific detail, and that is exactly what does not survive two years of memory.

What to write down

Date, organisation, hours, and a sentence on the work. The sentence is the part people skip and the part that turns out to matter — "ran the Saturday intake shift" is usable two years later in a way that "volunteering, 4 hours" is not.

A supervisor's name and an email address for anything that might need signing off. Organisations lose staff, and the person who can verify your hours in ninth grade may not be there in twelfth.

If the work changed over time — you started sorting donations and ended up training new volunteers — record that when it changes. Progression is the most interesting thing about a long commitment and it is invisible in an hours total.

Who actually asks for the number

Your school, if it has a service requirement for graduation. Many do, with a specific total and a specific form.

Scholarships, particularly local and community ones, which frequently ask for a documented total and sometimes for verification.

Honour societies and service organisations, which usually set their own minimums.

College admissions is generally not in this list — what is read there is what you did and how long you stayed, not the total. But that is not a reason to keep a loose record, because the other three are real.

Why doing it later goes badly

Reconstructing service from memory in senior autumn produces round numbers and vague descriptions, which is the least convincing possible version of true information — and senior autumn is the worst-timed moment to be doing it.

It also tends to lose the small recurring commitments, which are frequently the strongest thing in the record. An hour a week for two years is more than a hundred hours and it is exactly the sort of thing nobody remembers to count.

Track them as they happen

A free tracker with dates, organisations and hours. No account, and nothing leaves your browser.

Open it

Orblite keeps the whole four-year plan in one place, and tells you the one thing worth doing next.

Free to start · no card · about ten minutes to your first plan

Meet Orblite

Read next

Do colleges care about volunteer hours?

They care about what you did and whether you stayed, not the total. Why there is no hour threshold, and what makes service read as genuine.

Am I doing enough for college?

A question with no scoreboard behind it. What 'enough' actually means, why the comparison you are making is unreliable, and how to answer it for yourself.