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🎖Military time converter

✓ Tested & verified Updated: How this works

Military time converter

24-hour (military) time

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Military time is written without a colon and spoken digit by digit.

  • With a colon—
  • 12-hour clock—
  • Spoken—

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How does military time work?

The TimerPlan military time converter turns 6:30 pm into 1830 and back, and shows how it is spoken — one eight three zero, not eighteen thirty. Military time is a 24-hour clock written as four digits without a colon, so the hours run from 0000 through 2359 and no AM or PM is needed.

Two points cause nearly all the confusion. Midnight is 0000 and starts the day; 2400 is used only to close one out, as in a shift ending at 2400. Noon is 1200.

The 12-hour clock’s own trap runs the other way: 12:00 AM is midnight and 12:00 PM is noon, which is the reverse of what most people guess. That single ambiguity is the reason hospitals, airlines and the military use 24-hour notation at all — there is no hour of the day it can express two ways.

The whole chart, since most visits are really looking for one row of it:

12-hourMilitary12-hourMilitary
12:00 AM (midnight)000012:00 PM (noon)1200
1:00 AM01001:00 PM1300
2:00 AM02002:00 PM1400
3:00 AM03003:00 PM1500
4:00 AM04004:00 PM1600
5:00 AM05005:00 PM1700
6:00 AM06006:00 PM1800
7:00 AM07007:00 PM1900
8:00 AM08008:00 PM2000
9:00 AM09009:00 PM2100
10:00 AM100010:00 PM2200
11:00 AM110011:00 PM2300

The trick for the afternoon is subtraction: any military time from 1300 onwards is twelve less in 12-hour form, so 1700 is five o’clock. Before 1200 the two agree, which is why the morning never causes trouble.

For arithmetic on those times rather than notation, the time calculator adds and subtracts, and the time duration calculator gives the gap between two of them. Across countries, the time zone converter does the same in 24-hour form where you want it.

Frequently asked questions

Is 1200 noon or midnight?

Noon. Midnight is 0000 at the start of a day, and 2400 at the end of one — the same instant described from either side, which is why timetables use 2359 to avoid the argument entirely. The 12-hour clock is where it gets genuinely confusing: 12:00 AM is midnight because AM means before noon, and 12:00 PM is noon because PM means after it.

How do you say 1830 out loud?

One eight three zero, or eighteen thirty in ordinary civilian 24-hour use. A whole hour takes hundred — 1800 is eighteen hundred, or one eight hundred hours in strict usage. Zero-hour times keep the leading zero when spoken: 0600 is zero six hundred, which is where the phrase oh-six-hundred comes from.

Why do hospitals use 24-hour time?

Because a misread AM or PM in a medication record is a twelve-hour error, and twelve hours is the difference between a dose and an overdose. The same reasoning applies to flight schedules, rail timetables and military orders: any system where a time is written by one person and acted on by another benefits from a notation that cannot be read two ways.

Does military time use a colon?

Not traditionally — 1830, four digits, no separator, sometimes followed by a zone letter such as Z for UTC. Civilian 24-hour time keeps the colon: 18:30. Both are here, since the question is usually about reading someone else’s notation rather than choosing your own.

How this works

Whatever you type is parsed into minutes past midnight, so the three notations are three ways into the same number: four-digit military form, colon-separated 24-hour form, and 12-hour form with AM or PM. The 12-hour rules applied are the standard ones — 12:00 AM is 00:00 and 12:00 PM is 12:00 — since those are the two values that make an unguarded conversion wrong by twelve hours. Output is produced from that minute count in all forms at once, including the spoken version, which is generated digit by digit with the word hundred for whole hours because that is how the notation is read aloud. The chart below is a static reference and matches the converter exactly.

Worked example

With Time 6:30 pm · 18:30 · 1830 — all three are understood 6:30 pm, this page works out —. Military time is written without a colon and spoken digit by digit.

Sources:

Where the notation earns its keep

No ambiguity. Every one of the day’s 1440 minutes has exactly one four-digit spelling.

Sorts correctly. As text, 0930 sorts before 1400 — which is not true of “9:30 am” and “2:00 pm” in any spreadsheet.

One character shorter than it looks. Four digits carry what “6:30 pm” needs seven to say.