0730 Military Time

0730 is half past seven in the early morning, 7:30 AM. The first two digits are the hour, the last two are the minutes, and the minutes are the same in every system: 30 stays 30. Only the hour needs attention: the hour is below 12, so drop the leading zero and add AM: 7 o’clock in the morning.

Seven in the morning, when day shifts in hospitals, plants and fire stations start or hand over.

0730 sits 7.5 hours after midnight. A standard eight-hour shift that starts at 0730 ends at 1530; a twelve-hour shift ends at 1930.

Every single minute of this hour is listed on the 0700 page.

Adding whole hours to military time is a plain sum until you pass 2359, then you subtract 24 and move to the next day. A shift from 0730 that lasts eight hours ends at 1530. For a shift with a break, the work hours calculator does the subtraction and accepts both formats.

Military to 12-hour. The hour is below 12, so drop the leading zero and add AM: 7 o’clock in the morning. Keep the 30 minutes: 0730 is 7:30 AM.

12-hour to military. 7 AM keeps its number and gains a leading zero so that it has four digits: 7:05 AM is 0705. So 7:30 AM is 0730: no colon, no AM, four digits.

The common slip is writing “07:30 AM”, which mixes the two systems. The evening counterpart of 0730 is 1930, twelve hours later.

0730 is said “zero seven thirty”. With minutes attached, the word “hundred” disappears; “zero seven hundred thirty” is wrong, and so is “seven thirty hundred”. The leading zero is still spoken, which is what makes it sound military rather than civilian.

Minutes follow the same logic. 0705 is “zero seven zero five” and 0740 is “zero seven forty”. Single-digit minutes get a spoken zero, so the listener knows a digit is there.

About the word “hours”: in speech, “zero seven 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 0730”, not “at 0730 hours”.

On its own, 0730 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 0730Z 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.