Military time: 1600 = 4:00 PM

Military time is the 24-hour clock. Convert any 24-hour time to 12-hour and back, with the chart and the zone labels below.

Military time is the 24-hour clock, and the number people ask about most is1600 — which is 4:00 PM. It’s not a time zone and it doesn’t “point” anywhere: 1600 just means “the 16th hour, zero minutes,” i.e. 4:00 PM in whatever zone you’re in. If someone writes 1600 EST, they mean 4:00 PM in Eastern Time; 1600 PST means 4:00 PM Pacific. The EST / EDT / CST / MST / PST / UTC suffix only names the zone; the 12-hour reading is the same 4:00 PM in each of them.

Use the converter below for any time — type 1600 and it answers4:00 PM; type 4:30 PM and it answers1630; type a range like 0700 to 1600 and it shows the whole span.

What is military time?

Military time is the 24-hour clock that the U.S. military, aviation, and most operations-heavy fields use to remove AM/PM ambiguity. It runs from 0000 (midnight) to 2359 (the last minute before midnight), written as a four-digit group: hour hour, minute minute. There’s no daylight-saving trickery in the conversion itself — a 12-hour clock face becomes a 24-hour one by one simple rule: hours after noon get +12, and 12:00 AM becomes 0000 while 12:00 PM stays 1200.

So 1600 is 4 PM, 1300 is 1:00 PM, 0700 is 7:00 AM, and 0000 is 12:00 AM. Because it never flips between AM and PM, a time like “1600” can’t be misread as 4:00 AM the way “4:00” can on a 12-hour schedule.

1600 in EST, CST, MST, PST and UTC

Military time carries no zone of its own, so 1600 is 4:00 PM wherever you are. The letters people tack on just say which zone that 4:00 PM is in:

To work out the wall-clock time in a specific zone — say, what 16:00 UTC is in New York — use the time zone converter on this site, which computes zone offsets live from your device’s IANA time zone database. And to see where each of those zones sits, theUS time zone map shades all six U.S. zones on one map.

Common military time ranges around 1600

0700 to 1600 military time

0700 to 1600 is 7:00 AM to 4:00 PM — the classic full working day.

0800 to 1600 military time

0800 to 1600 is 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM, the standard office schedule.

0600 to 1600 military time

0600 to 1600 is 6:00 AM to 4:00 PM, a 10-hour span common in shift work.

1600 to 2000 military time

1600 to 2000 is 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM — the evening hours after a workday ends.

Military time converter

The converter at the top of the page goes both directions and handles ranges: 24-hour to 12-hour (1600 → 4:00 PM), 12-hour to 24-hour (4 PM → 1600), and spans like 0700 to 1600 → 7:00 AM to 4:00 PM. It also shows the zone-labeled readings — 4:00 PM EST, 4:00 PM CST, 4:00 PM MST, 4:00 PM PST, and 16:00 UTC — so you can answer “what is 1600 in EST” without doing any arithmetic.

Military time chart: 24-hour to 12-hour

A quick-reference chart of the 24-hour (military) clock against standard 12-hour time. Highlight the row you need; the rule is one and the same for every row — above 1200, subtract 12 and use PM; below 1200, keep the hour and use AM.

Military time vs. standard time

“Standard time” is the everyday 12-hour clock with AM and PM; military time is the same instant written on the 24-hour clock. The two are a one-to-one mapping — no zone or DST information is involved in the conversion, only a relabeling:

• 12:00 AM (midnight) = 0000, not 1200.
• 12:00 PM (noon) = 1200.
• 1:00 PM = 1300 — every hour after noon adds 12 (1 PM→13, 4 PM→16, 8 PM→20).
• Minutes never change: 4:15 PM is 1615, and 1615 is 4:15 PM.

The one thing military time is not: a time zone. A “1600 EST” meeting means 4:00 PM Eastern — not 1600 UTC. For zone-to-zone math, thetime zone converter handles it exactly, and theUS time zone map shows which zone each city is in.