Military Time Converter

How to convert military time to standard time (and back)

Standard to military takes two rules. For AM times, keep the hour and pad it to two digits: 9:30 AM becomes 0930. For PM times, add 12 to the hour: 4:24 PM becomes 1624. Drop the colon, drop the AM or PM, and you have your four digits.

The other direction just reverses that. If the hour is under 12, the time is AM and you strip the leading zero: 0930 is 9:30 AM. If the hour is 13 or higher, subtract 12 and label it PM: 2145 is 9:45 PM.

Three worked examples:

• 0930: hour is under 12, so it is 9:30 AM, spoken "zero nine thirty hours."
• 1624: 16 minus 12 is 4, so it is 4:24 PM, spoken "sixteen twenty-four hours."
• 2145: 21 minus 12 is 9, so it is 9:45 PM, spoken "twenty-one forty-five hours."

Military time to decimal hours: what payroll actually runs on

A punch card reading 0715 to 1945 is not 12.30 hours. It is 12 hours and 30 minutes of elapsed time, and after a 30-minute unpaid lunch it is 12 hours flat, which payroll records as 12.00 decimal hours. The gap between 12.30 and 12.00 is the reason this conversion matters: payroll multiplies hours by a rate, and that only works when time is one number instead of two.

The conversion is one division. Take the minutes, divide by 60. Thirty minutes is 0.50, forty-five minutes is 0.75, and forty minutes is 0.67, so 8 hours 40 minutes is 8.67 decimal hours. Some employers call these "military minutes," which is the same idea wearing a different name.

Then most employers round. Federal rules under 29 CFR 785.48(b) permit rounding to the nearest quarter hour, provided the practice does not over time fail to compensate employees for all time actually worked. Tenth-hour rounding (6-minute increments) is the other common setting. The two can disagree: a 7-hour-52-minute shift is 7.87 exact, 7.90 at tenth-hour, and 7.75 at quarter-hour. Over a five-day week that adds up to real money, which is why the shift mode above shows exact and rounded side by side with the gap in minutes.

If your hours are already written as HH:MM, the decimal hours converter does the same math without the military step. To add several converted entries into a week total, use the hours and minutes calculator, or run the whole week at once in the timesheet calculator.

The military time chart

Every hour of the 24-hour clock, with its standard-time equivalent, how it is spoken aloud, and its decimal value counted from midnight. 0000 and 2400 point at the same instant. The military and ISO 8601 both prefer 0000 for the start of a day and keep 2400 for marking the end of one, so 0000 is the safer thing to type into any timekeeping system.

Minutes to decimal hours

The payroll half of the chart. Every value here is the minute count divided by 60, rounded to two places.

Two examples using both tables: 0715 to 1945 with a 30-minute unpaid lunch is 12:00 paid, or 12.00 decimal hours. And 8 hours 40 minutes converts as 40 divided by 60 equals .67, giving 8.67 hours.

Night shifts, midnight, and the wrap

Subtracting 2200 from 0600 gives negative 16 hours, which is why a lot of converters just refuse the question. The fix is to add a full day (1440 minutes) to the clock-out whenever it lands before the clock-in, then subtract. A 2200 to 0600 night shift comes out at 8 hours. The shift mode above does that wrap for you and marks it with a "crosses midnight" badge.

The wrap has a second consequence, and it shows up on the pay stub. A shift that straddles two calendar days can also straddle two workdays, which matters under daily overtime rules. California, for example, counts overtime past 8 hours in a workday, and an employer using the "day the shift started" convention will attribute the whole span to the first day. Others split it. If your state has daily overtime, or your employer pays a shift differential after a set clock time, that split changes what you are owed. Once the hours are in decimal, the overtime calculator handles the over-40 and over-8 math.

If you would rather not run this every pay period, ClockWage44 logs the shift while you work it, applies the job's overtime mode across the midnight boundary, and works federal tax, state tax, FICA, and deductions into a take-home figure on your device.