2000 Military Time

2000 is 8:00 PM, eight o’clock in the evening. On a 24-hour clock with a colon it is 20:00; in military style the colon goes and the four digits stand alone. The hour is 20 hours after midnight and 4 hours before the next one.

Eight in the evening. From 2000 on, the first digit alone tells you it is late: nothing that starts with a 2 happens before 8 PM.

To read it, look at the first two digits: the hour is above 12, so subtract 12 and add PM: 20 − 12 = 8. The last two digits are minutes and never change, so 2025 is 8:25 PM and 2050 is 8:50 PM.

Military to 12-hour. Split the four digits into hours and minutes, the hour is above 12, so subtract 12 and add PM: 20 − 12 = 8. So 2015 becomes 8:15 PM and 2045 becomes 8:45 PM.

12-hour to military. 8 PM is a PM hour, so add 12: 8 + 12 = 20. 8:05 PM is 2005. Drop the colon and the AM or PM, and you have the four digits.

The mistakes worth knowing: “20:00 PM” is a mix of both systems and means nothing, because a 24-hour time already says which half of the day it is. And 2000 is not 20:00 AM; there is no 20 o’clock in the morning.

2000 is said “twenty hundred”. The “hundred” stands in for the two zeros; nobody says “thirteen zero zero”. Numbers from ten upward are said as ordinary numbers: “twenty hundred”, not “one zero hundred”.

Minutes follow the same logic. 2005 is “twenty zero five” and 2040 is “twenty forty”. Single-digit minutes get a spoken zero, so the listener knows a digit is there.

About the word “hours”: in speech, “twenty 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 2000”, not “at 2000 hours”.

On its own, 2000 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 2000Z 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.