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Who really said it

Time is Money

Written by Benjamin Franklin 1706–1790 · American printer, scientist and statesman
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Franklin wrote it in Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One (1748), where it opens the letter’s first paragraph of practical hints. The line is genuinely his — but the phrase was already in print in 1719, so he used a maxim rather than minted one.

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“Time is Money” Benjamin Franklin, "Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One" (1748): "Remember that Time is Money." Franklin wrote the line, but did not coin it — the exact phrase was already in print in The Free-Thinker, no. 121, 18 May 1719. Via Quotle.info

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In context

Evoking the world of Benjamin Franklin — Printer, scientist, diplomat and Founding Father. Theme: "Time is Money". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Provenance

Where it comes from

Work
Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One
First printed
1748, in George Fisher’s The American Instructor: or Young Man’s Best Companion
Author
Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)
Already in print
The Free-Thinker, no. 121, 18 May 1719 — anonymous

Remember that Time is Money. He that can earn Ten Shillings a Day by his Labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that Day, tho’ he spends but Sixpence during his Diversion or Idleness, ought not to reckon That the only Expence; he has really spent or rather thrown away Five Shillings besides. Opening lines

That is the 1748 orthography, capitals and all. The posthumous collected Works print the same sentence as “Remember that time is money” — the lower-case version almost everyone quotes today.

Advice to a young Tradesman, full text at Wikisource

How the phrase travelled

  • 1719 — the exact phrase is already in print, anonymously, in the London periodical The Free-Thinker: a shoemaker’s wife who grasps “the intrinsick Value of Time” tells her husband, in vain, that Time is Money. The passage survives in the collected volume III, London, 1723 ↗
  • 1748 — Benjamin Franklin opens Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One with “Remember that Time is Money,” then does the arithmetic: idle away half a ten-shilling day and you are out five shillings, not the sixpence you actually spent. Full text at Wikisource ↗
  • The maxim did not start with him — Quote Investigator traces it and finds the 1719 printing twenty-nine years ahead of Franklin, plus older proverbs of the same shape. Quote Investigator: Maxim Origin: Time is Money ↗
  • Wikiquote lists the sentence in its Sourced section for the 1740s, credited to Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One (1748). Wikiquote: Benjamin Franklin ↗
Public domain

Advice to a Young Tradesman was first printed in 1748 and Franklin died in 1790, so the essay and the collected Works that carry it are long out of copyright in the United States. The 1719 Free-Thinker passage quoted alongside it is equally in the public domain.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What gets it wrong

Franklin wrote the sentence. What he did not do is invent it — and that is the part almost every retelling gets wrong.

Not Franklin — an anonymous London essayist 29 years earlier

The exact phrase is in The Free-Thinker for 18 May 1719, no. 121, in a story about a shoemaker’s wife who understood the value of time and a husband who never minded how the minutes passed. Quote Investigator found it by exact-phrase search ↗

Older than the wording Proverbial

Quote Investigator cites the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs for two much earlier cousins in very different phrasing — “the most costly outlay is time,” attributed to Antiphon, and “They saye tyme is precious” from a 1572 Discourse upon Usury. See the citations ↗

Franklin — but modernised Spelling drift

The 1748 text capitalises it: “Remember that Time is Money.” The posthumous collected Works print “Remember that time is money,” which is the form that reached us. Both are Franklin; only the typography moved. Compare the Works text ↗

Franklin really wrote it — Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One, 1748 — but he picked up a phrase already in circulation rather than coining one. Quote Investigator’s full trace ↗

Context

Why it mattered

Franklin was not writing philosophy. Advice to a Young Tradesman is a short letter of practical hints to a young man starting out, and the famous line opens the first of several paragraphs that each begin “Remember.” What follows is arithmetic, not aphorism: earn ten shillings a day, idle away half of it, and you are down five shillings even though you only spent sixpence on the diversion.

That accounting move — putting unworked hours on the books as a cash loss — is why the sentence outlived the pamphlet. Max Weber reached for Franklin’s advice about time and money to illustrate the argument of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05), using it to show that early capitalism was a moral philosophy rather than simple greed. Weber quotes Franklin’s ethical writings directly ↗

“Remember that Time is Money.” Franklin wrote it — twenty-nine years after somebody else printed it.

How the 1719 printing was found

Quote Investigator is careful about what the 1719 match proves: the phrase matches exactly because the search was for an exact match. The viewpoint behind it is much older and can be formulated many different ways, so “first exact printing” and “first expression of the idea” are different questions. Quote Investigator, ‘Maxim Origin: Time is Money’ ↗

The passage sits in the collected third volume of The Free-Thinker, printed in London in 1723, which gathers the 1719 numbers from March onward. The scanned copy at the Internet Archive carries it, in an OCR that garbles ‘is’ into ‘it’ but leaves the sentence unmistakable. The Free-Thinker, vol. III (1723) ↗

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Filed under

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Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Maxim Origin: Time is Moneyquoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation: confirms Franklin used the maxim in 1748 and documents the exact phrase in The Free-Thinker, 18 May 1719, no. 121, plus older proverbial cousins from the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs.
Advice to a young Tradesman (full text)en.wikisource.org

The complete essay as printed in the posthumous Works of the late Doctor Benjamin Franklin, opening 'REMEMBER that time is money.'
The Free-Thinker, vol. III (London, 1723)archive.org

Scan of the collected volume gathering the 1719 numbers, including the shoemaker's-wife passage that predates Franklin by twenty-nine years.
Time is money (aphorism)en.wikipedia.org

Encyclopedia overview citing both the 1719 Free-Thinker wording and Franklin's 1748 essay in George Fisher's The American Instructor.
Benjamin Franklin — Sourced quotationsen.wikiquote.org

Files 'Remember that time is money' in the Sourced section under Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One (1748).
Franklin, Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748)onwork.edu.au

Bibliographic entry reproducing the passage in its 1748 capitalisation and linking the Founders Online transcription.

About the author

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin

1706–1790 · Printer, scientist, diplomat and Founding Father

Franklin ran a Philadelphia printing house, published Poor Richard’s Almanack for more than twenty years, did the electrical research that made his name, and was a drafter and signer of the Declaration of Independence. He was also candid about borrowing other people’s lines — “Why should I give my Readers bad lines of my own,” he asked, “when good ones of other People’s are so plenty?” Advice to a Young Tradesman is his own composition; the maxim that made it famous was not.

For writers & researchers

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Benjamin Franklin, “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One” (1748), first printed in George Fisher, The American Instructor: or Young Man’s Best Companion (1748); text as given in Works of the Late Doctor Benjamin Franklin. The phrase itself was already in print in The Free-Thinker, no. 121, 18 May 1719.

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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Time is Money’?” Last verified 1 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/time-is-money/

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