Military Time Chart: All 24 Hours, Both Ways

Military time chart for all 24 hours

Four digits, no colon, no AM or PM. The first two digits are the hour from 00 to 23, the last two are the minutes. Here is the full hour-by-hour map.

How to say the hours military time uses out loud

On a whole hour, you read the four digits and add the word hours: 0600 is "zero six hundred hours", often shortened in speech to "oh six hundred". Hours below 1000 keep the leading zero when written and when spoken.

When there are minutes, nobody says "hundred". 1430 is "fourteen thirty", 0745 is "zero seven forty five", 2205 is "twenty two zero five". The word "hours" is usually dropped once minutes are involved.

What is military time and who uses it

Military time is the US armed forces convention for writing the 24-hour clock as a single four-digit number with no colon and no AM or PM marker. 0730, not 7:30 AM. The day runs from 0000 to 2359, which is 1,440 distinct minutes with exactly one spelling each.

It is not only a military habit. Aviation, hospitals, emergency dispatch, railways and most of the world outside North America run on the same 24-hour clock, usually written with a colon as 07:30. The difference between 0730 and 07:30 is punctuation, not meaning.

How to do military time conversion in your head

Reading the chart works, but the arithmetic is two rules deep. Going from military time to the 12-hour clock:

• 0000 to 0059: the hour is 12 AM. 0030 is 12:30 AM.
• 0100 to 1159: drop the leading zero, add AM. 0915 is 9:15 AM.
• 1200 to 1259: keep the 12, add PM. 1245 is 12:45 PM.
• 1300 to 2359: subtract 1200, add PM. 1845 is 6:45 PM.

How to convert standard time to military time

Backwards is just as short. Add 1200 to any PM hour, leave AM hours alone, and pad the result to four digits.

• 12:xx AM becomes 00xx. 12:07 AM is 0007.
• 1 AM to 11:59 AM keeps its hour, padded. 7:05 AM is 0705.
• 12:xx PM stays 12xx. 12:45 PM is 1245.
• 1 PM to 11:59 PM gains 1200. 6:30 PM is 1830, and 11:59 PM is 2359.

The two cases people get wrong are both around 12. Midnight loses its 12 and becomes 00, while noon keeps it. Everything else follows the add or subtract rule without exception.

Why is midnight 0000 and noon 1200

Because the 24-hour day starts at midnight and counts elapsed hours from there. Midnight is zero hours into the day, so 0000. Noon is twelve hours in, so 1200. The 12-hour clock inherits the same logic but restarts the count, which is exactly where 12 AM and 12 PM become guesswork.

Then there is 2400. It is a legitimate way to write the end of a day, and ISO 8601 permits 24:00 as the final instant of one day, identical to 00:00 on the next. It is the same moment written from two different sides. Schedules that need a hard end almost always write 2359 instead, so no reader has to work out which date is meant.

Why the 24 hour clock prevents scheduling mistakes

Drop the AM from 8:00 AM and you have created an ambiguity worth twelve hours. Drop nothing from 0800 and it still means one thing. That single property is why hospitals chart medication times this way and why flight plans do not contain the letters AM.

A zero-padded 24-hour time also sorts correctly as plain text. 0930 comes before 1015 alphabetically as well as chronologically, which is why log files and filenames use it. A 12-hour list sorts 1:00 PM before 9:00 AM and quietly scrambles your timeline.

It removes one ambiguity, not all of them. The date written beside the time is still read differently depending on where the reader lives, which we unpack in why date formats differ by country.

How to print 24-hour time in code

Every date formatting library draws the same line between the two clocks: one code for the 24-hour hour, another for the 12-hour hour that needs an AM or PM marker beside it.

In Python and in the C-style strftime codes, %H is the hour from 00 to 23, %I is the hour from 01 to 12, and %p prints AM or PM. Military time is simply %H%M with nothing between them.

datetime.now().strftime("%H%M")

On the command line, the same two codes apply:

date +%H:%M

In the browser, the hour12 option decides it. Intl.DateTimeFormat and toLocaleTimeString will happily hand you a 12-hour string under a US locale unless you say otherwise:

new Date().toLocaleTimeString('en-GB', { hour12: false })

Other languages spell the same idea differently. PHP uses H for the padded 24-hour hour, h for the 12-hour one and G for 24 hours without the leading zero. Go writes 15 for the 24-hour hour and 03 for the padded 12-hour hour. Day.js style patterns use HH and hh. Our strftime builder lists all of them side by side for Python, PHP, Go and JavaScript, and previews your format string live as you type, so you can confirm you picked %H and not %I before shipping it.

When a military time converter saves you time

Mental arithmetic is fine for one time. It stops being fine the moment a time zone joins in, because you are then subtracting 1200 and adding an offset at once, with a date rollover waiting to catch you.

That is the job of the timezone converter. Type the date and the time in HH:MM:SS form, pick a source and a target zone from the searchable lists, and it returns the full date and time in 24-hour form, the date on its own as YYYY-MM-DD, the time on its own as HH:MM:SS, the Unix timestamp in seconds and the ISO 8601 string. There is a swap button for the two zones, a button that fills in the current time, and a copy button on every result row.

If you just need to see what 24-hour time it is elsewhere right now, the world clock ticks 16 major cities once a second in HH:MM:SS with no AM or PM anywhere, shows each city's UTC offset, and lets you add any time zone your browser knows about. Click a city and its current time goes to your clipboard.

Timezone converter

Convert a 24-hour time across zones without the mental maths

Enter a date and an HH:MM:SS time, pick two zones, and get the result in 24-hour form plus the Unix timestamp and the ISO 8601 string.

Convert a timeFree, no signup

Frequently asked questions