Time Duration Calculator

This time duration calculator allows you to calculate the duration between two times. It accepts either two elapsed times or two clock times, where it supports both the 12-hour and 24-hour time of day formats. The calculator correctly handles time durations that span midnight. As a bonus, this article shows you how to calculate time duration manually, making sure you have a firm understanding of the maths behind the calculator.

After you've finished using this calculator, you might also be interested in our day counter calculator.

Simplistically, time is the 4th dimension in our Universe, along with the three spatial dimensions of length, width, and height. You could say that time exists so that everything doesn't happen at once. A universe without time wouldn't be a particularly exciting place to live. Time provides separation of events and allows cause and effect to be determined. So that's time sorted, right? Err, no. Not really. Physicists and philosophers are still debating the exact nature of time and how it behaves to this very day.

Fortunately for us, as long as we measure two times in the same inertial frame of reference (a little bit of relativity there, time dilation calculator will help you grasp the concept), our time duration calculator will work just fine, without knowing exactly what time is.

The elapsed time calculator is in the first part of the calculator, found at the top. Enter a start time and an end time, and you will see the duration between those two times. By default, you can enter the times in hours, minutes, and seconds. However, if you click on the units, you can select other time units to suit your needs.

Note that you can enter any two times in this section of the calculator (as long as the end elapsed time is more than the start elapsed time), and there are no restrictions imposed by the 12- or 24-hour time formats. Though if you are interested in the duration between two clock times, the next section of the calculator is just for you.

The second section of the calculator is a clock time calculator. This calculator helps work out the duration between two times during a single day, or overnight. You can choose to either work with the 12-hour clock format (the one we most use in everyday life) or the 24-hour format (which you might encounter when booking a flight, for example). Here's how you use the clock time duration calculator:

1. Select either the 12-hour or 24-hour time formats.
2. Enter the start clock time, giving the hour, minute, and optionally second. If you are using the 12-hour clock, don't forget to select whether it is am (in the morning) or pm (afternoon/evening).
3. Then do the same for the end clock time. The calculator supports time durations that start on one day and end the next day. So you could find the time duration from 8 pm until 5 am the next morning.
4. The time duration calculator result will be shown as the number of hours, minutes, and seconds between the two times. If you want to see the result in another time unit (e.g., just in seconds), click on the units to display the dropdown menu.

If you need to calculate time durations for a whole week at work, then our time card calculator might be worth checking out.

Let's take some time to discuss how to do these time duration calculations manually. The same principles apply to both the elapsed time calculator and the clock time calculator (though for the clock time calculator, if you are using the 12-hour time format, the first thing to do is to convert it to the 24-hour format. The solution is simply a case of adding 12 hours to any pm times!).

We will first study the example of calculating the time duration between 8:13 am and 4:55 pm. So we first convert the pm time to the 24-hour format:

• 4:55 pm => 4 + 12 = 16 => 16:55

We can then write down the two times the same way you would do a manual math subtraction:

Then, calculate the difference in hours and minutes separately. In this example, the result for the number of hours is 16 − 8 = 8 hours, and for the number of minutes, it is 55 − 13 = 42 minutes.

Next, let's look at a more complicated example. How about 8:13 am until 4:07 pm? We convert the pm time to 24-hour clock format as before and write down the subtraction:

On this occasion, however, if we try to do the subtraction on the minutes' column, we would end up with minus 6. In this case, we need to convert an hour from the hours' column to 60 minutes in the minutes' column so we can get a positive value for the time difference. Here is what the new manual subtraction looks like:

So 16 hours became 15 hours, and 7 minutes became 67 minutes, when we added the 60 minutes, carried over from the hours' column. Now we can do the subtraction for the hours 15 − 8 = 7 hours and minutes 67 − 13 = 54 minutes as before. This same carryover method can be used if we also had a seconds' column.

Finally, if you want to calculate a time difference from one day to the next, you would need to add a day column and carryover 24 hours (as it is a day in the future), adding it to the hours column of the first time. For example, to find the duration between 4:07 pm until 8:13 am the next morning, you would do:

So for some clock times, calculating the duration between two times is a little tricky, so it might be better to use our calculator instead!