Military time counts hours from 0000 at midnight to 2359 at 11:59 PM, never resetting at noon and never needing AM or PM. The conversion is two rules: add 12 to any PM hour from 1 to 11 (7:42 PM → 1942), and leave everything else alone except the two twelve o'clocks, where 12 AM becomes 0000 and 12 PM stays 1200. You pronounce it by saying hours as hundreds: 1942 is "nineteen forty-two."
Going from familiar 12-hour time to military time:
Minutes never change. That's worth repeating because it's the one thing people doubt: the minutes are identical in both systems, only the hour is coded differently.
Going the other way, subtract 12 from any hour of 13 or higher and call it PM: 1545 is 3:45 PM, 2300 is 11 PM. Hours below 12 are AM as-is (0930 is 9:30 AM), with 00 reading as 12 AM.
| 24-Hour | 12-Hour | Spoken | 24-Hour | 12-Hour | Spoken |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0000 | 12:00 AM | zero hundred | 1200 | 12:00 PM | twelve hundred |
| 0100 | 1:00 AM | zero one hundred | 1300 | 1:00 PM | thirteen hundred |
| 0200 | 2:00 AM | zero two hundred | 1400 | 2:00 PM | fourteen hundred |
| 0300 | 3:00 AM | zero three hundred | 1500 | 3:00 PM | fifteen hundred |
| 0400 | 4:00 AM | zero four hundred | 1600 | 4:00 PM | sixteen hundred |
| 0500 | 5:00 AM | zero five hundred | 1700 | 5:00 PM | seventeen hundred |
| 0600 | 6:00 AM | zero six hundred | 1800 | 6:00 PM | eighteen hundred |
| 0700 | 7:00 AM | zero seven hundred | 1900 | 7:00 PM | nineteen hundred |
| 0800 | 8:00 AM | zero eight hundred | 2000 | 8:00 PM | twenty hundred |
| 0900 | 9:00 AM | zero nine hundred | 2100 | 9:00 PM | twenty-one hundred |
| 1000 | 10:00 AM | ten hundred | 2200 | 10:00 PM | twenty-two hundred |
| 1100 | 11:00 AM | eleven hundred | 2300 | 11:00 PM | twenty-three hundred |
Hours are spoken as hundreds, minutes as two digits. 0900 is "zero nine hundred" (or "oh nine hundred" once you're off the radio), 1200 is "twelve hundred," and the word "hours" can follow the whole thing: "eighteen hundred hours." When minutes aren't zero, most people say the hour then the minute pair: 1942 is "nineteen forty-two," and 0930 is "zero nine thirty."
The digit-by-digit style ("one nine four two") belongs to specific military contexts where each digit must survive a bad radio connection. In everyday hospital or aviation use, the hundreds style is what you'll hear.
Both exist and they point at the same minute from opposite directions. 0000 is the start of a new day, which is what digital clocks, timestamps, and most writing use. 2400 is the end of a day, and it shows up mainly in schedules that span midnight: a shift written 2000 to 2400, or a facility "open until 2400." One minute after 2359, the clock reads 0000 of the next day, never 2401.
Plain military time is local. Zulu time is the same 24-hour format stamped in UTC, the reference time zone, marked with a Z: 1400Z. The US military, aviation, and shipping use it so a timestamp means the same instant worldwide regardless of local time zones. The name comes from NATO phonetic alphabet, where Z is "Zulu." If you see a Z, the number is UTC; if you don't, it's local. Our time zone converter handles the offset math between zones.
Ambiguity is expensive. A medication order for "7:00" has failed in hospitals because day and night swapped; a traveler has missed flights over a 12:30 that was 00:30. The 24-hour clock deletes the failure mode instead of training around it, which is why the military standardized it across NATO, why the FAA and ICAO require it in aviation, and why most of Europe, Latin America, and much of Asia never left it. The US is the outlier that runs two systems side by side.
Both directions, spoken forms, the full chart, and a live 24-hour clock for sanity checks.
Military Time Converter →Military time is the 24-hour clock: hours run 0000 at midnight through 2359 at 11:59 PM, with no AM or PM suffix. Instead of resetting at noon, the hour keeps counting, so 1 PM is 1300, 6 PM is 1800, and 11 PM is 2300. Minutes work exactly like the 12-hour clock you already use.
Add 12 to the hour for anything from 1 PM to 11 PM and keep the minutes. 2:47 PM becomes 1447, 6:15 PM becomes 1815. Noon is the exception that does not move: 12:00 PM is 1200. And the hour after midnight runs low, 12:01 AM is 0001.
Say the hour as if it were a count of hundreds, then the minutes as two digits. 0700 is zero seven hundred hours, 1200 is twelve hundred hours, 1942 is nineteen forty-two. Whole hours get the word hundred, and the word hours optionally follows: eighteen hundred hours.
The US military, aviation, hospitals, emergency services, and logistics, plus civilians across most of continental Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia and Africa. Anywhere an AM/PM mix-up has consequences, 24-hour time wins: a flight departing 0635 and another at 1835 cannot be confused the way 6:35 AM and 6:35 PM can.