Military time converter, 12 hour to 24 hour.

A military time converter turns 12-hour time with AM and PM into 24-hour time, and back. Military time is the 24-hour clock written as four digits: the first two are the hour from 00 to 23 and the last two are the minutes, so 3:45 PM is 1545. There is no AM or PM, and no colon is needed. Type a time in the box on the right and all the forms appear at once, with how to say it aloud.

How to use the converter

1. Type a time in Type a time, such as 3:45 pm, 1545, 08:00 or noon. Press Use the time now to fill in your own clock.
2. Read the cards: Military time is the big one, then 12-hour time, 24-hour time, Say it and Digit by digit.
3. Tick Show seconds to add seconds, or type them, as in 08:30:15.
4. Under Convert many times, paste a list with one time on each line and press Copy the table to take the answers away.
5. Under Military time chart, choose how many rows you want and press Print the chart. Your browser's print window can also save it as a PDF.

Converting by hand

For the morning, keep the hour as it is. 9:05 AM is 0905. For the afternoon and evening, add 12 to the hour. 3:45 PM is 3 plus 12, which is 15, so 1545. 11:20 PM is 2320. There are two special hours around 12. 12:05 AM is just after midnight, so the hour becomes 00 and the time is 0005. 12:30 PM stays 1230, because noon is already 12.

To go back, subtract 12 from any hour over 12 and add PM. 1830 is 18 minus 12, which is 6, so 6:30 PM. 0000 to 0059 is 12 AM, and 1200 to 1259 is 12 PM. Hours 01 to 11 are AM and keep their number.

The 24 hours at a glance

How to say military time

Military style says the hour as two digits, then the minutes. 0800 is "zero eight hundred". 1545 is "fifteen forty-five". 2300 is "twenty-three hundred". When the minutes are one digit, say a zero first: 0005 is "zero zero zero five". On the radio each digit is said alone: the FAA's phraseology guide (checked 18 Oct 2026, FAA air traffic phraseology) gives "two two three zero" for 2230 and says 9 is said "niner". The converter shows both ways, under Say it and Digit by digit.

Midnight: 0000 or 2400

12:00 AM is 0000, the start of a new day. 2400 means the end of a day, which is the same instant as 0000 on the next day. 24:00 on 12 April and 00:00 on 13 April are one moment. A draft of the ISO 8601 date and time standard, kept on the Library of Congress site (a 2016 working draft of part 1, ISO/WD 8601-1, read 18 Oct 2026), writes the start of a day as 00:00:00 and the end of a day as 24:00:00, and says the 24 form is for the end of a day in a time interval. It is a draft, so check the final standard if a contract depends on it.

The US National Weather Service uses the same idea in its forecasts (checked 18 Oct 2026, National Weather Service time page): a forecast ending at midnight uses 24 as the hour, and one beginning at midnight uses 00. In everyday use, write 0000 for the start of a day, and use 2400 only for a closing time such as a shop that closes at 2400. The last minute of a day is 2359. This converter reads 2400 and 24:00 as the end of the day and shows them as 0000.

What the Z means

A time ending in Z, such as 1545Z, is in UTC, the world's reference time. NIST says the Z time zone is equivalent to UTC, the phonetic alphabet calls the letter Z "Zulu", and the name is still used in some settings, such as military, nautical and aviation, to refer to UTC (checked 18 Oct 2026, NIST page on UTC and Zulu time). The FAA guide says the term Zulu may be used to denote UTC. UTC has no daylight saving, so the gap between your clock and Z changes with the seasons.

Take 1430 in Pacific standard time, which is UTC-8. Add 8 hours and you get 2230, so it is 2230Z. Tick Also show it in UTC and pick your zone, and the converter does this for today's date, daylight saving included. To compare other places, use the time zone converter.

Common problems

• A time with no AM or PM. The box reads it as 24-hour time, so 8:30 is 0830. Add pm to read it as 8:30 PM.
• 1260 or 2460. Minutes stop at 59 and hours at 23, so these are not times.
• Three digits. 830 is read as 0830.

To see the time right now on a big clock, use the online clock. For the gap between two times, try days between dates.