Military Time Chart & Converter
Convert military (24-hour) time to standard 12-hour time — and back.
Results are provided as is, for general information. Check anything important before relying on it. See the Terms of Use.
About this tool
Converts between 24-hour military time (1530, 15:30, "1530 hours") and standard 12-hour time (3:30 PM), in either direction, and shows the spoken form used over aviation and military radio ("fifteen thirty"). The classic pitfalls are handled explicitly rather than guessed at: 0000 and 2400 both name midnight but are read differently depending on whether it's the start or end of a day, 12:00 AM is midnight while 12:00 PM is noon, and an ambiguous bare time like "3:30" with no AM/PM is rejected with a request to clarify rather than silently assumed. A full 24-row chart mapping every hour to its military form, standard form and spoken form sits below the converter, built from the same conversion logic so it can never drift from the answer above it.
How it works
PM hours: 24-hour = 12-hour + 12 (except 12 PM = 12) 12 AM (midnight) = 00, 12 PM (noon) = 12
Military time counts the hours from 00 to 23 with no AM or PM. From 1 PM to 11 PM add 12 to the hour. The two twelves are the trap: 12:30 AM is 00:30, just after midnight, while 12:30 PM is 12:30 and stays as it is.
| Question | Working | Answer |
|---|---|---|
| 2:30 PM in military time | 2 + 12 = 14; minutes unchanged | 1430 |
| Midnight (0000) in standard time | 00 → 12 AM | 12:00 AM |
| 12:30 AM in military time | 12 AM → 00 | 0030 |
When to use it
Questions
What's the actual difference between 0000 and 2400?
Both name the exact same instant, midnight, but by convention 0000 marks the start of a day and 2400 marks the end of the previous one — used, for example, when a schedule reads "ends at 2400" rather than "starts at 0000 the next day." The tool accepts 2400 as input and reports it back as 0000 with a note, since 0000 is the form almost everything downstream expects.
Why is a bare "3:30" rejected instead of just converting it?
Because it's genuinely ambiguous — 3:30 could mean 03:30 or 15:30, and guessing would silently give the wrong answer roughly half the time. Add AM or PM, or write it in military form (1530), and the ambiguity disappears entirely.
What is a military time chart?
A table that lists every hour of the day in 12-hour form, 24-hour (military) form and spoken form, so you can look a time up instead of calculating it. The chart below the converter covers all 24 hours, from 0000 (12:00 AM, midnight) to 2300 (11:00 PM), and is built from the same logic as the converter. To read any hour yourself, add 12 to PM hours from 1 PM on: 3 PM is 1500.
How is noon written in military time?
1200 — not 0000 or 2400, which are both midnight. Noon is simply the twelfth hour of the day, counted the same way every other hour is.
Why does 12:00 AM mean midnight and 12:00 PM mean noon, and not the other way round?
It's a fixed convention, not something you can derive logically — 12 sits at neither the "before" nor "after" side of itself on a 12-hour dial. By convention 12 AM marks the start of the day (midnight) and 12 PM marks its middle (noon). It trips people up constantly, which is exactly why the chart below the converter spells out "(midnight)" and "(noon)" next to both rows instead of leaving them as bare times.
What convention does the spoken form follow?
The one used over aviation and military radio: a whole hour is read as "hundred" (1700 → "seventeen hundred"), and a leading zero in either the hour or the minutes is spoken aloud rather than dropped (0905 → "zero nine oh five") so a number can't be misheard or silently lost over a radio channel.