Military time converter

In short: Military time writes the 24-hour clock as four digits with no colon and no AM or PM: 0000 is midnight, 1200 is noon and 1530 is 3:30 PM. To convert a time after noon, subtract 12 from the hour; before noon, keep the hour and add AM. The converter does both directions as you type and counts the hours between two times.

Last updated 10 October 2026

How military time works

Military time counts the hours of the day from 0 to 23 and writes every time as four digits: two for the hour, two for the minutes, no colon. The day starts at 0000, midnight, and ends at 2359. There is no AM or PM because no hour number is used twice, so 0700 and 1900 are different numbers rather than the same number with a different label. Leading zeros are always written, which is why seven in the morning is 0700 and not 700.

Said aloud, every digit counts. 0700 is "zero seven hundred", 0730 is "zero seven thirty", 1615 is "sixteen fifteen". On the hour the minutes are read as "hundred"; once there are minutes on the clock they are read as a plain number. In speech people often add the word hours at the end. Army correspondence rules (AR 25-50, paragraph 1-26) describe the written form: four digits based on the 24-hour clock, the first two the hour after midnight, the last two the minutes, with the word hours left out.

Military time and the 24-hour clock

The two are the same clock written differently. The 24-hour clock puts a colon between the hour and the minutes, 15:30, and is the normal written form in most of the world: train timetables, airline tickets, hospital charts, computer logs and the ISO 8601 date and time standard all use it. Military time drops the colon, 1530, and has its own spoken form. A time with a colon is usually read like any clock time, "fifteen thirty" or "half past three"; a time without one is read digit by digit. Either way, the conversion to the 12-hour clock is the same sum.

Where military time is used

The armed forces use it so that an order or a log entry can only mean one moment. Hospitals use it on medication charts for the same reason: a dose written for 7:00 with the AM or PM missing is a risk, and 0700 is not. Aviation runs on it, usually in UTC, so that a flight plan reads the same in every time zone. Railways and bus timetables in most countries print it. And it is the usual form on timesheets, rotas and clocking systems, because subtracting a start time from a finish time is simpler when both are on the same 24-hour scale: our work hours calculator and shift rota generator both take times this way.

Military time conversion table

Every hour of the day, with the 24-hour form, the standard time and how the hour is said. Each time links to its own page with the quarter hours around it and the hours to common times.

The military time chart adds the afternoon and evening in 15-minute steps, and pages such as 1530, 1700 and 2130 explain a single time in full.

Midnight: 0000 or 2400?

Midnight is written two ways because it belongs to two days. NIST suggests 0000 for midnight at the beginning of a date and 2400 for midnight at the end of it, and advises against "12 a.m." and "12 p.m." because both are ambiguous. Army correspondence rules write times from 0001 to 2400, so their day ends at 2400. The ordinary 24-hour clock writes midnight as 00:00. The converter accepts 0000 and 2400 and labels each one, and treats 0000 to 2400 as a full 24 hours when you count the time between them.

Hours between two military times

To find the length of a shift, turn each time into minutes after midnight and subtract. 0730 is 450 minutes, 1600 is 960, and the difference is 510 minutes: 8 hours 30 minutes, or 8.5 decimal hours. If the finish time is earlier than the start time the shift crosses midnight, so the converter adds 24 hours: 2200 to 0600 is 8 hours. Payroll usually wants decimal hours, where each minute is a sixtieth of an hour, so 8 hours 20 minutes is 8.33. For a whole week with breaks and overtime, use the work hours calculator.