0300 Military Time

0300 is 3:00 AM, three o’clock in the night. On a 24-hour clock with a colon it is 03:00; in military style the colon goes and the four digits stand alone. The hour is 3 hours after midnight and 21 hours before the next one.

Three in the morning. A night shift that began at 2300 is at its halfway point, and anyone awake is usually paid a differential for it.

To read it, look at the first two digits: the hour is below 12, so drop the leading zero and add AM: 3 o’clock in the morning. The last two digits are minutes and never change, so 0325 is 3:25 AM and 0350 is 3:50 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: 3 o’clock in the morning. So 0315 becomes 3:15 AM and 0345 becomes 3:45 AM.

12-hour to military. 3 AM keeps its number and gains a leading zero so that it has four digits: 3:05 AM is 0305. Drop the colon and the AM or PM, and you have the four digits.

The mistakes worth knowing: “03:00 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 0300 is not 3 PM; 3 PM is 1500.

0300 is said “zero three hundred”. The “hundred” stands in for the two zeros; nobody says “thirteen zero zero”. The leading zero is spoken: “zero three hundred”. “Oh three 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. 0305 is “zero three zero five” and 0340 is “zero three forty”. Single-digit minutes get a spoken zero, so the listener knows a digit is there.

About the word “hours”: in speech, “zero three 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 0300”, not “at 0300 hours”.

On its own, 0300 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 0300Z 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.