Military Time Converter

What the military time converter does

This converts between the 12-hour clock you say out loud, with its AM and PM, and military time, the 24-hour format written as four digits. It goes both ways: give it 1300 and it returns 1:00 PM, or give it 1:00 PM and it returns 1300. It is the quick translator for when you meet one format but think in the other.

How to use it

1. Pick a direction. Military to Standard, or Standard to Military.
2. Time. Enter the time, such as 1300 for military or 1:00 PM for standard.

Press Convert and the matching time in the other format appears.

What military time is

Military time is the 24-hour clock, written as four digits with no colon and no AM or PM. The day runs from 0000 at midnight through to 2359 a minute before the next midnight. Up to noon it matches the 12-hour clock fairly closely, so 9:30 in the morning is 0930. After noon it keeps counting instead of resetting, so 1:00 in the afternoon is 1300, 6:00 in the evening is 1800, and 11:00 at night is 2300. It is spoken in hundreds, so 1300 is "thirteen hundred."

The conversion rule

The whole of it comes down to the afternoon. For morning times, the two formats are nearly the same, you just write the hour as two digits, so 7:05 AM is 0705. For afternoon and evening times, you add 12 to the hour, so 3:00 PM becomes 15, giving 1500. Going back the other way, any 24-hour time from 1300 onward has 12 taken off the hour and gains a PM, so 2000 becomes 8:00 PM. The two special cases at midnight and noon are the only ones that do not follow that neatly, which is the next section.

Midnight, noon, and the confusion it clears up

This is the real reason the 24-hour clock exists. On the 12-hour clock, midnight and noon are both "12 o'clock," and the labels 12 AM and 12 PM are genuinely easy to mix up, since neither is obviously the dark one or the bright one. Military time has no such trouble. Midnight is 0000 and noon is 1200, two clearly different numbers, so there is never any doubt which you mean. That single ambiguity, and the muddle it causes in schedules and timetables, is why so many fields that cannot afford a mistake use the 24-hour format. In converting, midnight maps 12 AM to 0000 and noon maps 12 PM to 1200.

Where it is used

The 24-hour clock is standard in the military, which is where the name comes from, and in aviation, hospitals, emergency services, and transport timetables, all places where a misread time could cause real problems. It is also simply the everyday way of telling time across much of the world. So this converter helps whenever you are reading a schedule, a log, or a travel time in one format and are more comfortable in the other.

Questions people ask

What is 1300 in standard time?

1:00 PM. From 1300 onward you subtract 12 from the hour and add PM, so 1300 is 1:00 PM and 1800 is 6:00 PM.

How do I convert a PM time to military time?

Add 12 to the hour, except for 12 PM. So 3:00 PM becomes 1500, and 9:45 PM becomes 2145. Noon stays as 1200.

What is midnight in military time?

0000. Noon is 1200. Keeping those two as different numbers is exactly what the 24-hour clock is for, since 12 AM and 12 PM are easy to confuse.

Are morning times the same in both?

Almost. You just write the hour as two digits, so 8:15 AM is 0815. The afternoon is where the formats diverge.