Military Time Converter

Military time counts the hours of the day from 00 to 23, so it never needs a.m. or p.m. It is written as four digits with no colon: the first two are the hour and the last two the minutes. The minutes never change between the two systems; only the hour does.

The first rule turns 1 p.m. to 11 p.m. into 1300 to 2300, so 3:15 p.m. becomes 1515. The second runs the other way for hours 13 to 23. Morning hours from 1 a.m. to 11 a.m. keep their number and gain a leading zero, so 1:20 a.m. is 0120.

Twelve o'clock is the exception both ways. 12 p.m. is noon, which stays 1200. 12 a.m. is midnight, which becomes 0000. ISO 8601 also allows 2400 for midnight at the end of a day.

An evening dose at 2100

A hospital chart says the next dose is at 2100. Hours from 13 to 23 lose 12, so it is 9:00 p.m.. A nurse would say "twenty-one hundred hours". That leaves 3:00 until midnight, when the 24-hour clock starts again at 0000.

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A briefing in New York, in Zulu time

An order sets a briefing for 7:45 p.m. New York time, which is 1945. On October 27, 2026, New York is UTC−4, military zone letter Q (Quebec), so the briefing is 2345Z. After the clocks go back on November 1, New York is UTC−5 (letter R, Romeo), and the same 1945 is 0045Z the next day.

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The end of a late shift

A rota lists a shift from 1800 to 2400. That end time is 12:00 a.m. at the end of the day, the same moment as 0000 the next morning. Writing 2400 makes it clear the shift ends tonight, not this morning.

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The large answer is the time in the other system. The tiles give the spoken form, the same time with a colon, the minutes since midnight and the time left until midnight.

• Spoken form. Read the two pairs of digits, then "hours". On the hour, the minutes are said as "hundred": 0800 is "zero eight hundred hours". Some services say "oh" instead of "zero", so follow your unit's habit.
• With a colon. Civilian 24-hour time, on timetables and phones, writes 17:52 where military time writes 1752. They mean the same thing.
• Zulu time. Z means UTC. Each whole-hour offset has a letter: R (Romeo) is UTC−5 and Q (Quebec) is UTC−4. India's UTC+5:30 has no single letter.

The dial shows where the time sits in the day. The right half is a.m. and the left half, shaded, is p.m. Military hours run round the inside and 12-hour labels round the outside, so 14 sits next to 2p. Drag the handle and the box you typed in follows, in 5-minute steps.

Rosters often mix the two forms. Paste a column into the list card and each row comes back in both, with any entry it cannot read, such as 25:00 or 7:75, flagged by row so you can fix it at the source.

• Adding 12 to noon. 12 p.m. is 1200, not 2400. Only 1 p.m. to 11 p.m. get 12 added.
• Writing the hour after midnight as 12. 12:30 a.m. is 0030, not 1230. On a 24-hour clock, 1230 is half past noon.
• Dropping the leading zero. 905 for 9:05 a.m. is common but easy to misread in a schedule. Write 0905.
• Reading a clock time as a length of time. 1530 is half past three in the afternoon, not 15 and a half hours. For the time between two clock times, use a duration calculator.
• Forgetting daylight saving in Zulu time. A New York time is 4 hours behind UTC in summer and 5 in winter, so the Z time moves by an hour when the clocks change.