0200 Military Time

0200 is 2:00 AM, two o’clock in the night. On a 24-hour clock with a colon it is 02:00; in military style the colon goes and the four digits stand alone. The hour is 2 hours after midnight and 22 hours before the next one.

Two in the morning, the quietest hour on most duty rosters and the hour that US clocks skip in March and repeat in November when daylight saving time changes.

To read it, look at the first two digits: the hour is below 12, so drop the leading zero and add AM: 2 o’clock in the morning. The last two digits are minutes and never change, so 0225 is 2:25 AM and 0250 is 2:50 AM.

Military to 12-hour. Split the four digits into hours and minutes, the hour is below 12, so drop the leading zero and add AM: 2 o’clock in the morning. So 0215 becomes 2:15 AM and 0245 becomes 2:45 AM.

12-hour to military. 2 AM keeps its number and gains a leading zero so that it has four digits: 2:05 AM is 0205. Drop the colon and the AM or PM, and you have the four digits.

The mistakes worth knowing: “02:00 AM” is a mix of both systems and means nothing, because a 24-hour time already says which half of the day it is. And 0200 is not 2 PM; 2 PM is 1400.

0200 is said “zero two hundred”. The “hundred” stands in for the two zeros; nobody says “thirteen zero zero”. The leading zero is spoken: “zero two hundred”. “Oh two hundred” is common in conversation and in films, but “zero” is what radio procedure and most instructors use, because “oh” can be misheard.

Minutes follow the same logic. 0205 is “zero two zero five” and 0240 is “zero two forty”. Single-digit minutes get a spoken zero, so the listener knows a digit is there.

About the word “hours”: in speech, “zero two hundred hours” is everywhere, and nobody will correct you. In writing, Army Regulation 25-50 says the word is not used with military time, so a memorandum reads “at 0200”, not “at 0200 hours”.

On its own, 0200 is local time wherever it is written. When the four digits carry a letter, the letter is the time zone. Z stands for Zulu, which is UTC, and J (Juliet) means the local time of the person speaking. The table converts 0200Z to the four US zones, in standard time and in daylight saving time.

Eastern Time is four hours behind UTC from March to November and five hours behind the rest of the year, which is why one Zulu time maps to two possible local times. The other three zones follow the same pattern an hour further west each.

Midnight has a second spelling, 2400, used when it marks the end of a day rather than the start. The full rules, with a converter, are on the military time chart page.