Military time converter

How to convert to military time

Military time numbers the hours of the day from 00 to 23 and writes them with the minutes as one four-digit block, without a colon and without AM or PM. The rule for converting from a 12-hour clock is short: for AM times keep the hour (but write 12 AM as 00); for PM times add 12 to the hour (except 12 PM, which stays 12). Then pad to four digits. To convert back, subtract 12 from any hour of 13 or more and add PM; hours 00 to 11 are AM, with 00 read as 12 AM.

Example: 2:30 PM is a PM time, so 2 + 12 = 14 and the result is 1430, spoken as "fourteen thirty hours". 7:05 AM becomes 0705 ("zero seven zero five"), and 11:59 PM becomes 2359. Midnight at the start of a day is 0000; some schedules write the very end of a day as 2400 so that a shift from 1600 to 2400 clearly ends that same night.

Reading and saying military time correctly

In speech, the hour and minutes are read as two numbers followed by "hours": 1800 is "eighteen hundred hours", 0930 is "zero nine thirty" (or "oh nine thirty" in casual use), and 2015 is "twenty fifteen". The word hundred is used only on the full hour. Writing the leading zero matters, because 0930 and 930 can be misread on handwritten logs and rosters.

The most common mix-ups involve noon and midnight. 12 PM is noon (1200), not midnight, and 12 AM is midnight (0000). Hospitals, aviation, emergency services and the armed forces use the 24-hour system precisely because it removes this ambiguity. Aviation and the military often add a time-zone letter, such as 1430Z for Coordinated Universal Time ("Zulu"); without the letter the time is local. The same 24-hour reading with a colon, such as 14:30, is the everyday standard across most of Europe and Asia and is defined in ISO 8601.