Military Time Converter

One time in gives you every form of that time out. The minutes never change in a conversion, only the hour and the AM or PM label.

1. Pick a time with the time picker, or type it in the first field.
2. You can also type a four digit military time such as 1430 in the second field instead.
3. Press Calculate to see the standard 12-hour time, the military time, how to say it, and the decimal hours since midnight.
4. Press Reset to clear the form and start over.

Military time is the 24-hour clock written as four digits with no colon and no AM or PM, running from 0000 at midnight to 2359. To turn military time into standard time, split the four digits into hours and minutes. Hours from 01 to 11 stay the same and take AM. Hour 12 stays 12 and takes PM. Hours from 13 to 23 lose 12 and take PM. Hour 00 becomes 12 and takes AM.

To go the other way, morning hours gain a leading zero, so 7:15 AM becomes 0715. Noon stays 1200. Afternoon and evening hours gain 12, so 3:45 PM becomes 1545 and 11:59 PM becomes 2359. Midnight is 0000 at the start of a day. The minutes are copied across unchanged in both directions.

Take 14:30. The hour is 14, which is more than 12, so subtract 12. 14 - 12 = 2. The minutes stay 30. Add PM, because the hour is past noon. The standard time is 2:30 PM and the military time is 1430, spoken as fourteen thirty hours. In decimal hours since midnight that is 14.50.

Try the reverse. Take 9:45 PM. The hour is 9 and it is PM, so add 12. 9 + 12 = 21. Keep the minutes at 45. The military time is 2145. The same rule works for every time of day, including the two special cases, midnight and noon.

The minutes follow the same pattern at every hour. 0130 is 1:30 AM and 1345 is 1:45 PM.

Midnight and noon cause most of the confusion, because 12 behaves differently from the other hours. Midnight is 0000, which converts to 12:00 AM, and noon is 1200, which converts to 12:00 PM.

Some systems also write 2400 for midnight at the end of a day, so 2400 on Monday means the same moment as 0000 on Tuesday. Most clocks, schedules and hospitals use 0000 for the start of the day, and this calculator does the same. If you see 2400 on a timetable, read it as midnight at the end of that day.

The 24-hour clock is also the format behind the ISO 8601 international standard for writing dates and times, which is why computers, timetables and booking systems store times this way. When a flight or a shift crosses zones, the time zone converter keeps the 24-hour times straight, and the countdown calculator counts down to a departure in the same format.