What is Military Time?
Posted on Tuesday, February 02, 2010
What is Military Time?
The HVAC, plumbers, electricians, and other relate service technicians often use military time to record their payroll timesheets. Service accounting and scheduling software may use military time to record service calls.
Military time runs on a 24-hour rotation and the civilian sector uses the “12 hour am/pm” method. Midnight is 0000, 11:59pm is 2359. Let's look at an example of military time and break it down.
Military Time: 14:30:00 -0500
The above example is telling our plumber that his service call starts at 2:00 PM. The first part (14:30:00) is military time. Actually official military time (for recordkeeping, accounting, etc) does not use colons; this would be read as 1400.
The 2nd part (-0500) is actually showing what time zone you are in. That means that you are 5 hours behind Greenwich Mean Time (also known as UTC). -0500 is US Central Time.
The main difference between regular and military time is how hours are expressed. Regular time uses numbers 1 to 12 to identify each of the 24 hours in a day. In military time, the hours are numbered from 00 to 23. Under this system, midnight is 00, 1 a.m. is 01, 1 p.m. is 13, and so on.
With regular time, you must the use of a.m. and p.m. to clearly identify the time of day. Military time uses a unique two-digit number to identify each of the 24 hours in a day, so a.m. and p.m. are unnecessary.
Regular time and military time express minutes and seconds in exactly the same way. When converting from regular time to military time and vice versa, the minutes and seconds do not change.
The following table summarizes the relationship between regular and military time. Regular Time
Midnight
1:00 a.m.
2:00 a.m.
3:00 a.m.
4:00 a.m.
5:00 a.m.
6:00 a.m.
7:00 a.m.
8:00 a.m.
9:00 a.m.
10:00 a.m.
11:00 a.m. | Military Time
0000
0100
0200
0300
0400
0500
0600
0700
0800
0900
1000
1100 | Regular Time
Noon
1:00 p.m.
2:00 p.m.
3:00 p.m.
4:00 p.m.
5:00 p.m.
6:00 p.m.
7:00 p.m.
8:00 p.m.
9:00 p.m.
10:00 p.m.
11:00 p.m. | Military Time
1200
1300
1400
1500
1600
1700
1800
1900
2000
2100
2200
2300 |
Using a Hundredths Scale
People occasionally encounter time written in a format that appears to use minutes larger than 59 (for example 7:82 or 7.82). Time written in this manner is being expressed in decimal hours (hours and hundredths of hours), not military time. Converting from decimal hours to hours and minutes is a different issue than converting between regular and military time.
Addressing hundredths is not within the scope of this article but basically 7.75 equals seven hours and forty five minutes. 7.25 equals seven hours and fifteen minutes.
What About Midnight?
Military personnel refer to midnight both as 0000 and 2400. However, digital watches and clocks that display time in a 24-hour format and computer equipment treat midnight as the start of a new day and express it as 0000.
Writing Military Time
Different professions and types of organizations write military time differently. The military, emergency services and hospitals usually write military time as hours and minutes without a colon and often add the word "hours" afterward. The format is: hoursminutes. Example: “1430” or “1430 hours”.
When expressing time down to the second, they insert a colon between the minutes and seconds using the format: hoursminutes:seconds.
Example: 1430:12 or 14:30:12 hours
Conclusion
Military time is an unambiguous, concise method of expressing the time. The HVAC, electrical, and plumbing industries as well as service and construction companies of all types will benefit from the understanding and use of military 24 time format. Service accounting software and scheduling software could use military time to reduce bookkeeping errors.
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