Military Time Conversion Chart for Timesheets

The first military time sheet I ever had to approve nearly paid out eight hours that nobody worked, which is the direction of error you never get warned about. It was a paper sheet from a small operation that ran a closing shift, and one line read 1700 to 0100. Whoever totaled it subtracted one number from the other, got a negative, decided that could not be right, dropped the minus sign, and wrote 16 hours for an eight-hour shift.

Nobody was being dishonest. The sheet was in the 24-hour clock, the shift crossed midnight, and plain subtraction produces nonsense in exactly that situation. That is the whole story of military time on a timesheet: the format itself is trivial, and the two places it breaks are midnight and the turn from 1200 to 1300, which is precisely where an evening or overnight schedule sits.

So the full chart is directly below, because that is probably what you came for. After it comes the part worth staying for: how to read a military time sheet, how to get from a four-digit punch to a number payroll can multiply, and what to do with a shift that ends on the next date. I build FirstHR, and I will say up front that if you have a handful of hourly staff on paper sheets, a printed chart taped next to the clock is a completely reasonable system.

The Chart

Every hour of the 24-hour clock, next to the standard time it maps to. The hours from 0100 to 1200 keep their number, 0000 is midnight rather than twelve, and the hours from 1300 to 2300 convert by subtracting 12.

The minutes are the part nobody needs a chart for, because they do not change at all. 1445 is 2:45 PM, 0715 is 7:15 AM, and the last two digits are always just the minutes past the hour.

If you only ever look up four values, these are the four that carry the rest.

In practice you will use six or seven rows of that table and never touch the rest. A business that opens at 0700 and closes at 2200 lives inside a narrow band of the chart, and the hours that matter are the ones your shifts actually start and end on. Print the whole thing anyway. The row you need at 2245 on a Friday is the one you never got around to memorizing.

How to Read Military Time

Read the first two digits as the hour and the last two as the minutes, then apply one rule: if the hour is 13 or higher, subtract 12 and call it PM. That is the entire conversion, and everything else on this page is about the handful of edge cases where it is not quite enough.

Two habits make it readable at a glance. Always write four digits, so quarter past seven in the morning is 0715 rather than 715, because a three-digit punch is ambiguous the moment somebody other than the writer reads it. And never append AM or PM, since the whole point of the format is that it does not need them.

You will also meet the same clock written with a colon, as 14:30, on scheduling screens and system exports. That is the identical time in a different notation and it reads perfectly well, but it is the wrong thing to write by hand on a timesheet. The colon is what invites somebody to read 1430 as fourteen point three zero, and a decimal reading of a clock time is the most expensive misreading on this page.

Converting Standard Time to Military Time

Going the other direction is the same rule in reverse: add 12 to any hour after noon, pad any hour before ten with a leading zero, and drop the colon. Here is the whole conversion in the cases that come up on real punches.

The row that catches people is 12:45 PM. The instinct is to treat any PM time as needing the plus 12, which turns the early afternoon into 2445 and produces a number that is not a time at all. Noon is already the twelfth hour, so the addition starts at one o'clock and not at noon.

Why Timesheets Use the 24-Hour Clock

Because every minute of the day gets exactly one code, which removes the single most expensive ambiguity on a paper timesheet: whether a punch written as 6:00 was the start of a morning shift or the end of an evening one. On a 24-hour sheet, 0600 and 1800 cannot be confused with each other, so a missing AM marker is no longer a wage dispute.

The ambiguity is not folklore. The National Institute of Standards and Technology is direct about it: 12 a.m. and 12 p.m. are ambiguous and should not be used, because the abbreviations mean before noon and after noon and noon is neither. NIST's suggested workarounds are to write 11:59 p.m. or 12:01 a.m. in documents that have to be unambiguous, or to use the 24-hour clock, which is what a shift-based business ends up doing anyway.

The second reason is that your records have to survive a question asked years later. Under the FLSA recordkeeping rules, you must keep the hours worked each day and the total hours worked each workweek for every non-exempt employee, and the Department of Labor is explicit that employers may use any timekeeping method they choose as long as the plan is complete and accurate. A four-digit punch is complete on its face. A punch reading 6:00 with no marker is not, and the burden of explaining it sits with you.

There is a practical reason on top of the legal one. Time clocks, scheduling tools, and payroll exports very often report in the 24-hour clock by default, so the format tends to arrive whether you chose it or not. When the punches on your paper sheet are written one way and the export you reconcile them against reads another, every step before you run payroll begins with a translation nobody wrote down.

The specific record items are set out in 29 CFR 516.2, which also requires you to record the time of day and day of the week on which each employee's workweek begins. That single field is the one most small businesses have never written down, and on a schedule with overnight shifts it is the field that decides which week an overnight's hours belong to.

Midnight, Noon, and 0000

Midnight is written 0000 when it begins a date and 2400 when it ends one, and noon is 1200 in every case. Those two sentences resolve most of the confusion people have with the format, and the reason they are not obvious is that the standard clock uses the same face for both ends of the night.

NIST puts the convention plainly in the same guidance: use 0000 to refer to midnight at the beginning of a given date and 2400 to designate the end of it. Both notations describe the same instant. What differs is which date that instant is attached to, and on a timesheet the date is the whole point.

Noon is the quieter trap. Because 1200 is a PM time that does not take the plus 12, people convert 12:30 PM to 2430 and 12:15 AM to 1215. Both are wrong, and both survive because the person checking the sheet reads them as plausible numbers. The check that catches it: any four-digit punch above 2400 is not a time, and no valid punch starts with 24 except 2400 itself.

Reading a Military Time Sheet

A military time sheet is an ordinary employee timesheet with the punches written in the 24-hour clock, which means reading it is a two-step job: elapsed time first, then decimal hours. Here is a full week for a day-shift employee with an unpaid meal break, worked all the way through.

Two things in that table are worth more than the arithmetic. First, adding the five rounded daily decimals gives 41.61, while converting the exact 41 hours and 36 minutes gives 41.60, so a hundredth of an hour appears out of nowhere. Convert from the exact minutes when you total, and treat the daily decimals as a display column.

Second, that week crossed 40 hours. The 1.60 hours above the line are overtime, and they are only visible because the elapsed time was calculated per day and totaled per week rather than eyeballed off the punches.

Approval is the step worth protecting. Whoever signs the sheet should read the punches rather than the totals, because a total calculated from a punch written twelve hours off is internally consistent and completely wrong. On a weekly timesheet that is five lines to scan, roughly a minute per person, and it catches almost everything this page is about.

The chart itself belongs on paper next to whoever fills the sheet in. This one downloads as a DOCX file, and the house rules underneath it are the part that actually prevents the errors.

From Military Time to Payroll Hours

Getting from a military time sheet to a number payroll can use takes two conversions, not one, and skipping the second is the most common failure I see. The first turns two clock times into elapsed time. The second turns the leftover minutes into a decimal fraction of an hour.

The second conversion is where military time gets blamed for an error it did not cause. A punch of 1743 is 5:43 PM, and a duration of 7 hours 43 minutes is 7.72 hours. Four-digit clock notation and decimal hours look similar and mean nothing alike, and the minutes to decimal conversion is a separate operation with its own chart.

Shifts That Cross Midnight

A shift that crosses midnight cannot be subtracted directly, because the clock-out looks earlier than the clock-in. Add 24 hours to the clock-out first, so a 2200 to 0630 night becomes 3030 minus 2200, which is 8 hours and 30 minutes. That one step removes the entire category of error.

The second half of the overnight problem is not arithmetic, it is attribution. The Department of Labor defines the workweek as a fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 hours, seven consecutive 24-hour periods, which need not match the calendar week and may begin on any day and at any hour. Averaging hours across two or more weeks is not permitted, so the week an overnight's hours land in changes whether that week crossed 40.

Pick a rule, write it down, and apply it identically to every overnight. Most small operations attribute the whole shift to the date it started on, which keeps one shift on one line and one line in one week. Whatever you choose, the definition belongs in the same document as your timekeeping rules, because a rule applied from memory is a rule that changes when the person changes.

This is also why the 24-hour clock and overnight scheduling tend to arrive together. A business running 12-hour shifts has half its roster clocking out on a date it did not clock in on, every week of the year, and a notation that cannot tell 0630 from 1830 turns that into guesswork. In that setting the format is not a stylistic preference. It is what keeps the record legible.

One more thing rides on the same punches. If you pay a premium for nights or weekends, the shift differential usually has to be folded into the regular rate before overtime is calculated, which means an overnight shift attributed to the wrong date can produce the wrong overtime rate and not just the wrong hours.

Putting It Into Practice

The format only works if everyone writing on the sheet uses it the same way, so the rollout matters more than the chart. Pick one notation, print the conversion table, show people the handful of values that break, and check the first two pay periods by hand before you trust the totals.

Training is the whole game. The error I see most often on a new military time sheet is 1:30 PM written as 0130, which reads as half past one in the morning and quietly moves twelve hours out of the pay period. It is not a comprehension failure, it is a habit that has not been replaced yet, and a chart taped next to the clock-in sheet fixes it faster than any amount of explaining.

The other habit worth building is a standing prompt before approval. A short timesheet reminder a day before the period closes gets the sheet in front of the employee while they still remember the week, which is the cheapest possible way to catch a punch written twelve hours off.

Common Mistakes

Every one of those has the same shape. The number that comes out looks like a time, it sits in a column of other numbers that look like times, and nothing about it announces that it is wrong. That is why the checks below are worth running by hand for the first couple of periods on any new sheet.

Frequently Asked Questions