Time Converter

The default setting converts hours into minutes, which is the most common timesheet question.

1. Type your duration into Value. Use decimals for parts of a unit, so a quarter of an hour is 0.25.
2. Choose the unit it is written in under From, anywhere from milliseconds to years.
3. Choose the unit you want under To. The answer is shown immediately, together with a line such as 1 h = 60 min.
4. Select Swap units to reverse the direction when you want to check your arithmetic.
5. Scan the In every unit list for the same duration in all eight units. Seeing seconds, hours and weeks together makes very large or very small values easier to grasp.

From milliseconds to weeks, time units are exact: 1,000 milliseconds make a second, 60 seconds a minute, 60 minutes an hour, 24 hours a day (86,400 seconds) and 7 days a week (168 hours). Months and years are different, because the calendar is uneven. The converter therefore uses averages and labels them so: a month is 30.4375 days, or 730.5 hours, and a year is 365.25 days, or 8,766 hours.

Those averages smooth out leap years and month lengths. They give sensible answers for rough planning, such as these:

• 1 year = 8,766 hours = 525,960 minutes = 52.18 weeks = 12 average months
• 10,000 hours = 416.67 days, a little under 59.5 weeks
• 1,000,000 seconds = 11.57 days
• 37.5 hours = 1.5625 days

They will not match a specific stretch of the calendar. A real 365-day year has 525,600 minutes, 360 fewer than the average year here, and February is only 28 or 29 days long. For the exact gap between two dates, use the date difference calculator, and for working out age in years, months and days, the age calculator.

Payroll systems often want hours as a decimal, while people think in hours and minutes. The conversion is simply minutes divided by 60. A shift of 1 hour 45 minutes is 1.75 hours, 45 minutes is 0.75 hours, and 90 minutes is 1.5 hours. Going the other way, multiply the decimal part by 60: 0.1 of an hour is 6 minutes, not 10. Typing 1.75 into Value with hours selected and minutes as the target gives 105 minutes, which is 1 hour 45 minutes.

Once hours are tidy, a monthly wage can be turned into an hourly rate with the salary to hourly calculator.

The tool does not split a result into hours, minutes and seconds, so 105 minutes appears as a plain number rather than 1:45. It also knows nothing about time zones, daylight saving or clock times. Moving a meeting from London to Karachi is a job for the time zone converter, and the seconds counted by computers since 1970 can be decoded with the Unix timestamp converter.

One more habit worth keeping: write down the unit next to every duration you copy between documents. A bare 90 could mean minutes in one spreadsheet and seconds in another, and a quick pass through this page costs nothing compared with a mis-booked project.

Longer spans are where a converter earns its place. A two and a half hour film is 150 minutes or 9,000 seconds. A 5,000 millisecond delay in a script is 5 seconds. An 18-month subscription is about 547.9 days, or 78.3 weeks, using the average month. A 90-day trial is 2.96 average months, a reminder that a trial and a calendar quarter are not the same length.

When the result will drive a contract, a payment date or a legal deadline, treat the figure as a guide and count actual calendar days instead. The converter has no way to know whether your period crosses a leap day or a month with 31 days.

Programmers will find the small end useful too. Timers and timeouts are usually set in milliseconds, so one day is 86,400,000 ms, one hour is 3,600,000 ms, and a 30-second timeout is 30,000 ms. Pick ms in From and the unit you think in under To to sanity-check a configuration value.