Military Time Converter

How to convert military time in your head

Military time counts the day straight through from 0000 to 2359 instead of splitting it into two 12-hour halves. That single change removes every AM/PM mix-up, and it makes conversion a two-rule exercise:

• Morning (first two digits 00–11): read it as-is and say AM. 0930 is 9:30 AM. The only wrinkle is midnight: 0000 is 12:00 AM, the start of the day.
• Afternoon and evening (first two digits 13–23): subtract 12 from the hour and say PM. 1545 → 15 − 12 = 3 → 3:45 PM. Noon itself, 1200, stays 12:00 PM.

Going from AM/PM to military time is the mirror image: keep AM hours and pad to four digits (4:00 AM → 0400), add 12 to PM hours except noon (8:15 PM → 2015), and write midnight as 0000 (12:20 AM → 0020). Note where the digits pair up: 4:00 AM is 0400 and 4:00 PM is 1600 — every afternoon hour is its morning twin plus 12.

Three worked examples

1545 → 3:45 PM

The hour digits are 15, which is 13 or greater, so this is a PM time. Subtract 12: 15 − 12 = 3. Keep the minutes unchanged: 45. Result: 3:45 PM, spoken in military style as “fifteen forty-five” — no “hundred”, because “hundred” is only used on the exact hour.

7:30 AM → 0730

AM hours keep their number; the work is purely formatting. Write the hour as two digits (07), append the minutes (30), drop the colon: 0730, spoken “zero seven thirty”. The leading zero is not decoration — it is what distinguishes a time (0730) from a quantity, and it is voiced when spoken.

12:20 AM → 0020

The hardest case. 12:20 AM is twenty minutes after midnight, so the hour is 00, not 12 and not 24: 0020, spoken “zero zero twenty”. The rule worth memorising: 12 AM maps to hour 00, and 12 PM maps to hour 12. If you remember nothing else about the edge cases, remember that.

Every hour of the day, with spoken forms

This table pairs each hour with its 12-hour equivalent and the conventional spoken form — the column most conversion charts leave out. For a finer version in 30-minute steps, see the printable military time chart.

* 2400 is an end-of-day marker: it labels the final instant of a day in ranges like “valid until 2400”, while 0000 starts the next day. As a time of day the two sit at the same position on the clock face.

Midnight and noon: the honest edge cases

Every conversion question that genuinely confuses people lives at 12. On the AM/PM clock, 12:00 AM is midnight and 12:00 PM is noon — an assignment so unintuitive that style guides often recommend writing “noon” and “midnight” instead. Military time dissolves the problem: noon is 1200, midnight starting a day is 0000, and midnight ending a day may be written 2400 in schedules and orders. One consequence worth knowing: a deadline of “midnight Friday” is ambiguous in civilian English (the start or the end of Friday?), but “0000 Friday” and “2400 Friday” are not — they are 24 hours apart.

Who actually uses this

• Service members and their families reading duty schedules, orders and leave paperwork written as 0600, 1300, 1700.
• Nurses and hospital staff — medication and charting times are commonly recorded in 24-hour form to prevent AM/PM dosing errors.
• Pilots, dispatchers and crews, where schedules run in 24-hour time and often in UTC (“Zulu”) rather than local time.
• Anyone reading international timetables — trains, buses and event listings across most of the world print 24-hour times like 18:30.
• Shift workers checking whether “shift starts 2130” means 9:30 PM (it does) before setting an alarm.

Popular lookups

Each page below gives the instant answer, the pronunciation, a worked conversion and a mini table of nearby times:

• Printable military time chart (0000–2330) — every 30 minutes with spoken forms, formatted to print on one sheet
• 0400 military time (4:00 AM) — early-shift wake-ups and the leading-zero rule
• 0600 military time (6:00 AM) — the classic morning formation hour
• 1300 military time (1:00 PM) — where the subtract-12 rule starts
• 1500 military time (3:00 PM) — mid-afternoon meetings and reports
• 1700 military time (5:00 PM) — end of the standard duty day
• 1800 military time (6:00 PM) — dinner hour and evening timetables
• 2000 military time (8:00 PM) — the "twenty hundred" evening block
• 2130 military time (9:30 PM) — how minutes are spoken off the hour