How the Time Converter Works
Time is measured in many units. A song is counted in minutes, a flight in hours, a project in weeks and a loan in years. The Time Converter changes an amount of time from one unit into another, so you can compare lengths of time, plan a schedule or answer a question such as "how many minutes are in 24 hours?".
What you enter
- The value: a number, which can have decimals.
- The unit you have (From): milliseconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks or years.
- The unit you want (To): any of the same units.
How the conversion works
Every unit has a fixed size in seconds. The converter turns your time into seconds, and then turns the seconds into the unit you chose:
seconds = value x seconds in the From unit result = seconds / seconds in the To unit
These are the sizes of the units:
| Unit | Size in seconds |
|---|---|
| 1 millisecond (ms) | 0.001 |
| 1 second (s) | 1 |
| 1 minute (min) | 60 |
| 1 hour (h) | 3,600 |
| 1 day | 86,400 |
| 1 week | 604,800 |
| 1 year (365 days) | 31,536,000 |
A minute is 60 seconds, an hour is 60 minutes, a day is 24 hours and a week is 7 days. A year is counted as 365 days, so it is 52.14 weeks.
A worked example
You want to change 24 hours into other units.
| Unit | Amount |
|---|---|
| Milliseconds | 86,400,000 ms |
| Seconds | 86,400 s |
| Minutes | 1,440 min |
| Hours | 24 h |
| Days | 1 day |
| Weeks | 0.142857 weeks |
| Years | 0.0027397 years |
The step for the minutes is 24 x 3,600 = 86,400 seconds, and then 86,400 / 60 = 1,440 minutes.
Hours to days
| Hours | Days |
|---|---|
| 1 | 0.0417 |
| 6 | 0.25 |
| 12 | 0.5 |
| 24 | 1 |
| 48 | 2 |
| 72 | 3 |
| 168 | 7 |
Chart: how many fit in the next unit
Each bar shows how many of the smaller unit make one of the larger unit:
seconds in a minute ████████████████████████████████████████ 60 minutes in an hour ████████████████████████████████████████ 60 hours in a day ████████████████ 24 days in a week █████ 7 weeks in a year ███████████████████████████████████ 52.14
Time does not use ten as its base, as the metric system does. That is why it takes a few steps to go from seconds to years.
Doing it by hand
- Hours to minutes: multiply by 60. So 2.5 hours is 150 minutes.
- Minutes to hours: divide by 60. So 90 minutes is 1.5 hours.
- Days to hours: multiply by 24. So 3 days is 72 hours.
- Days to weeks: divide by 7. So 45 days is 6.43 weeks, or 6 weeks and 3 days.
- Years to days: multiply by 365. So 2 years is 730 days.
- Seconds to minutes: divide by 60. So 600 seconds is 10 minutes.
Big numbers in time
- 1 million seconds is about 11.6 days.
- 1 billion seconds is about 31.7 years.
- 10,000 hours is 416.7 days, or about 1.14 years. It is often used as an example of the time needed to master a skill.
- 1 year (365 days) is 8,760 hours, 525,600 minutes or 31,536,000 seconds.
Where these conversions are used
- Work and pay: changing hours and minutes into decimal hours for a timesheet.
- Project plans: changing days into weeks, or weeks into months of work.
- Video, music and sport: changing the length of a track or a race into seconds or minutes.
- Computers and apps: timers and delays are often given in milliseconds or seconds.
- School and science: unit conversion exercises, and speed and rate problems.
Tips
- A year here is 365 days. A leap year has 366 days, and the average calendar year is 365.25 days (31,557,600 seconds). For exact dates, use a date calculator.
- Months are not included, because a month can have 28, 29, 30 or 31 days. For a rough size, a month is about 30 days or 4.3 weeks.
- Decimals are not minutes. 1.5 hours is 1 hour 30 minutes, not 1 hour 50 minutes. To write 0.25 hours as minutes, multiply by 60 to get 15 minutes.
- Use enough digits for small amounts. A few seconds in a year is a very small number, so the converter shows many digits.
What this converter does not include
- Months, decades and centuries.
- Time zones and clock times. Use a time zone calculator for those.
- The difference between two dates. Use a date or time duration calculator.
- Leap seconds and leap years.
This tool gives an estimate for general information only. For legal, payroll or scientific work that needs an exact time, check the rules that apply to you.