What does 1730 military time mean?

If you're in the military or work in a field where military time is used, you may be familiar with 1730 military time. Military time is a way of expressing the time of day using a 24-hour clock instead of using the 12-hour AM/PM format. For those who aren't familiar with this form of telling time, it can be confusing at first.

In short, 1730 military time translates to "5:30 PM" in the standard 12-hour time system used most commonly today. To understand why it's expressed this way and how to convert from one format to another, keep reading.

In the most basic sense, military time operates by saying every hour on the 24-hour clock instead of by AM or PM. For example, 1:00 PM would be expressed as 1300 hours; 6:00 PM would become 1800 hours; and 11:00 PM becomes 2300 hours. All times after midday (12:00 PM) are then expressed as a number between 1300 and 2359, which represents the number of minutes after midnight (0000 hour). The numbers correspond to how many minutes it has been since midnight.

So when you see 1730 on a clock or written down, that means it is 5:30 PM because it has been 1700 minutes (17×100) since midnight plus 30 more minutes makes it 5:30 PM. If you want to do the reverse and convert from 12-hours to 24-hours all you have to do is add 12 hours whenever you see PM on your clock and suddenly it will make sense why 1700 = 5:00PM and 1730 = 5:30PM! To summarize everything we've covered here's one example converting from 12 hour format to 24 hour format:

2:55PM --> 1455 Hours