Military Time Converter

Military time numbers the hours from 00 to 23.

Military time = the hour from 00 to 23, then the minutes from 00 to 59

Military time is the 24-hour clock written as four digits with no colon. The first two digits are the hour, counted from midnight, and the last two are the minutes. The day starts at 0000 and its last minute is 2359, so every time of day has exactly one form and AM or PM never has to be written. Written with a colon, 13:45, it is the same 24-hour clock, and the two convert digit for digit.

From midnight to noon the two systems almost agree. 7:05 AM is 0705 and 11:30 AM is 1130, with a leading zero to make four digits. The only morning hour that changes is 12 AM, the hour after midnight, which becomes 00, so 12:15 AM is 0015. After noon, every hour adds 12.

1:45 PM is 1345, because every afternoon hour adds 12.

The converter opens on that time, and the rule takes three steps.

• Take the hour and the minutes: 1:45 PM has the hour 1 and the minutes 45.
• Add 12 to the hour, because the time is after noon: 1 + 12 = 13.
• Write the hour and the minutes together with no colon: 1345, or 13:45 with one.

Noon is the exception that catches people. 12:30 PM stays 1230, because the 12 o'clock hour after noon is already the twelfth hour of the day, and adding 12 would give 2430, which is not a time. The last minute of the day checks the rule from the other end: 11:59 PM is 11 + 12 = 23, so 2359.

To read a military time after noon, subtract 12 from the hour.

Standard hour = military hour − 12, from 1300 to 2359

Going back, look at the first two digits. 01 to 11 are the morning hours and keep their number, with AM. 12 is the noon hour and takes PM. 13 to 23 lose 12 and take PM: 1345 is 13 − 12 = 1, so 1:45 PM, and 2215 is 22 − 12 = 10, so 10:15 PM. 00 is the hour after midnight, 12 AM. The military time chart below lists every hour of the day both ways.

Every minute follows its row, so anything from 1300 to 1359 is 1:00 PM to 1:59 PM. The converter shows that row under its answer.

Midnight is 0000 at the start of a day and 2400 at its end.

The one time with two military forms is midnight. NIST, the federal laboratory that keeps official US time, describes the 24-hour convention in its times of day FAQ: 0000 refers “to midnight at the beginning of a given day (or date)” and 2400 designates “the end of a given day (or date).” Monday 2400 and Tuesday 0000 are the same moment, written from either side of it.

That matters whenever a time has a date attached: a shift that ends at 2400 on Friday ends as Friday does, and one that starts at 0000 on Friday starts as it begins. The converter names 2400 as the end of a day, and the shift box asks for 0000 as a start.

Noon and midnight are where 12-hour times go wrong.

NIST is blunt about the 12-hour labels: “12 a.m. and 12 p.m. are ambiguous and should not be used.” The reason is in the Latin. a.m. and p.m. mean before noon and after noon, so noon itself is neither, and midnight is twelve hours before noon and twelve hours after it at once. NIST adds that it is fair for a digital clock to show p.m. as soon as it reaches 12:00 at noon, the convention behind 12:00 PM for noon and 12:00 AM for midnight. The converter follows that convention and names noon and midnight beside the answer, so neither can be misread.

A date makes it worse. NIST's example is an event “at midnight on Friday, October 20th,” which could mean the start of Friday or its end, a full day apart, and for contracts and insurance policies it suggests 11:59 p.m. or 12:01 a.m. instead. Military time removes the question: 0000 and 2400 on the same Friday are a day apart and cannot be confused, and 1200 is noon with no letters to get wrong. When the deadline is a number of days rather than a time, the date calculator and the days between dates calculator count it.

About one worker in seven usually works outside a regular daytime schedule.

Schedules that cross midnight are where 24-hour times earn their keep, and they are common. The BLS release Job Flexibilities and Work Schedules, 2024-2025, published on September 24, 2026, found that 85.2% of wage and salary workers usually worked a regular daytime schedule at their main job and 14.8% did not. Its Table 7 splits that 14.8%: 5.3% usually worked evenings, 3.4% nights, 1.9% rotating shifts, 2.1% irregular schedules, 1.0% split shifts and 1.1% some other schedule. Across the 151.5 million wage and salary workers in the table, 14.8% is about 22.4 million people.

The share depends heavily on the job. In transportation and material moving, 36.4% of workers were on a non-daytime schedule, including 11.7% who usually worked nights. Services came next at 28.1% and production at 24.9%. In management, business and financial operations it was 5.7%, and in construction and extraction 3.8%. For a team in the first group, a rota written in AM and PM gives every overnight shift two chances to be misread, and one written in military time gives it none.

Shift hours in military time subtract without any AM or PM.

Subtracting two military times is ordinary clock subtraction with one rule for night shifts: when the end is earlier than the start, the shift ran into the next day, so add 24 hours to the end first. An invented night shift from 2200 to 0630 works like this.

• 0630 is earlier than 2200, so the shift ends the next day: 06:30 + 24:00 = 30:30.
• 30:30 − 22:00 = 8:30, which is 8 hours 30 minutes on the clock.
• In decimal hours, 30 minutes ÷ 60 = 0.5, so the shift is 8.5 hours, or 510 minutes.

Subtract the hours and the minutes separately, because the four digits are not one number. A day shift from 0830 to 1715 is 8 hours 45 minutes: borrow an hour from 17 to make 16 hours 75 minutes, then take away 8 hours 30 minutes. Subtract 830 from 1715 as ordinary numbers and the answer is 885, which looks like 8 hours 85 minutes and is wrong, because an hour has 60 minutes, not 100.

The shift box under the converter does the subtraction. Take an unpaid meal break off in the hours calculator and add up a week of punches in the time card calculator. Two nights a year the clock itself moves. The Department of Labor's hours worked advisor gives the example of an 11:00 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. shift with a 30-minute lunch: 7 hours worked the night daylight saving time begins and 9 the night it ends. The time duration calculator counts that hour, and the time zone converter handles a team spread across zones, where 1400 in New York is 1100 in Los Angeles.

A clock in any format shows when people work, not whether they plan to stay.

Military time makes a rota impossible to misread. It cannot tell you which name on that rota is already looking for the exit. TeamPredict works on that part, reading public LinkedIn signals to flag resignation risk early, so a gap in the night shift shows up as a warning while there is still time to talk, rather than as a notice period you have to cover.