Military time converter

What is military time?

Military time is the 24-hour clock written with four digits and no colon. The day starts at 0000 (midnight) and ends at 2359, one minute before the next midnight. There is no AM or PM: 0900 is nine in the morning, 2100 is nine at night. The US armed forces use it, and so do hospitals, police and fire departments, airlines and most of the world outside North America, often with a colon (21:00) instead of four bare digits.

The point is to remove doubt. “Meet at 7” can mean two different times; 0700 and 1900 cannot. When a nurse writes a dose time or a pilot files a flight plan, nobody has to guess.

How to convert military time to standard time

The rule fits in two lines:

• From 0100 to 1259, the hour is the same: 0745 is 7:45 AM, 1215 is 12:15 PM. Just drop the leading zero and add AM (or PM for the 12 o’clock hour).
• From 1300 to 2359, subtract 12 from the hour and add PM: 1630 is 4:30 PM, 2310 is 11:10 PM.

The only special case is the midnight hour: 0000 to 0059 is 12:00 AM to 12:59 AM. Going the other way, from standard to military, add 12 to any PM hour from 1 PM to 11 PM (3:20 PM becomes 1520), keep AM hours as they are with a leading zero (6:05 AM becomes 0605), and turn 12 AM into 00.

Military time chart

Every full hour of the day, with the way it is said out loud:

How to say military time

Read the four digits as two pairs. The first pair is the hour, the second the minutes. When the minutes are 00, say “hundred”: 0600 is “zero six hundred”, 1400 is “fourteen hundred”. When the hour starts with a zero, say it: 0730 is “zero seven thirty” (some people say “oh seven thirty” in civilian life). Minutes from 01 to 09 also keep their zero: 1305 is “thirteen zero five”. The word “hours” at the end is optional and common in formal speech.

Never say “fourteen hundred hours PM”: the 24-hour format already tells the time of day. And “1500 o’clock” is not used.

Midnight: 0000 or 2400?

Midnight is written 0000 because it is the start of the new day, and that is what this converter shows. Some schedules write 2400 to mean the end of a day, for example a shift that runs “0800 to 2400”. Both point to the same moment, but 2400 belongs to the day that is ending. Times like 2430 do not exist: after 2359 comes 0000. Noon is simply 1200, “twelve hundred”.

Zulu time and military time zones

Military time tells you the hour, not the place. To avoid mix-ups between regions, the armed forces and aviation give each whole-hour offset from UTC a letter, said with the NATO phonetic alphabet. Z, said “Zulu”, is UTC itself, the reference used in flight plans, weather reports and military orders: 1335Z means 1:35 PM UTC. The tool shows your own letter from your device’s offset. The letter J, “Juliett”, is not on the map: it means the local time of whoever is reading, wherever that is.

Some places have half-hour or quarter-hour offsets, like India (UTC+5:30) or Newfoundland (UTC−3:30 in winter): they have no letter, and the tool says so. Daylight saving time changes the letter: New York is R (Romeo, UTC−5) in winter and Q (Quebec, UTC−4) in summer. To compare two cities, use the time zone converter or the world clock.

Where you will meet the 24-hour clock

• Hospitals and nursing: medication charts and patient notes are written in 24-hour time to prevent dosing errors.
• Travel: airline tickets, train timetables and most of Europe, Latin America and Asia use 24-hour times, with a colon.
• Work schedules: shift work, timesheets and payroll often log hours as 0700 to 1530. To total those hours, try the time card calculator.
• Computers and phones: any phone can display the 24-hour clock in its date and time settings.

Want a big 24-hour clock on screen? Press F for full screen: the military time stays large and the rest fades away. The online clock also has a 24-hour display, and the alarm clock accepts 24-hour times.