Military Time Converter

For a morning time, keep the hour and the minutes and write them as four digits: 9:30 AM becomes 0930 and 6:05 AM becomes 0605. For an afternoon or evening time, add 12 to the hour: 3:45 PM becomes 1545 and 11:00 PM becomes 2300. The two exceptions are both at twelve: 12 PM, noon, stays 1200, and 12 AM, midnight, becomes 0000.

Going back is the same rule in reverse. An hour from 13 to 23 has 12 taken off and becomes PM, so 1900 is 7:00 PM; an hour from 01 to 11 is AM; 12 is noon, and 00 is the hour after midnight, so 0030 is 12:30 AM. The converter does this in both directions as you type.

Military time is written without a colon and without AM or PM, and it is read in hundreds: 1300 is thirteen hundred, 0900 is zero nine hundred, and 1545 is fifteen forty-five. The word hours is often added after it. Midnight is 0000 at the start of a day, and some schedules write 2400 for the very end of one, so that a shift can run from 1600 to 2400 on the same date.

Military messages also carry a time zone letter, and the one most often seen is Z, read as Zulu, for Coordinated Universal Time. Local time is J, Juliet. On a civilian schedule none of this appears; the four digits alone are the time. Type a Z after a time here, as in 1730Z, and the converter reads it as Zulu and shows the local time in your time zone; type a local time and it shows the Zulu time beside it.

Most of the world writes the 24-hour clock in everyday life, usually with a colon, as 15:00. In the United States it is mainly used where a time must never be misread: the armed forces, hospitals and medical records, aviation, emergency services, and many transport timetables. On a chart of medication times, 0700 cannot be confused with 1900 the way 7:00 can.

The chart on this page lists all 24 hours with their 12-hour equivalents and prints on a single page, for a nurse’s station, a dispatch desk or anyone learning to read the 24-hour clock at a glance.

The most common mistake is at twelve. 12 PM is noon and stays 1200; adding 12 to it gives 2400, which is midnight. 12 AM is midnight and becomes 0000, not 1200.

The next is the leading zero. Military time always has four digits, so 9:30 AM is 0930, not 930, and five past midnight is 0005. AM and PM are never written after a military time, because the hour already says which half of the day it is: 1300 PM is not a time. A colon turns it back into the ordinary 24-hour clock, 13:00.

Last, the minutes are minutes, not hundredths. Only the hour changes between the two clocks, so 7:45 PM is 1945, and twenty minutes after 1350 is 1410, not 1370. The chart can show any quarter hour, :00, :15, :30 or :45, for the times a schedule uses most.