Hours to Minutes

Apps and reports love decimals: a fitness tracker says you slept 7.4 hours, a project tool logs 2.3 hours on a task, a GPS estimates 4.6 hours of driving. None of those are clock readings. Multiply the whole thing by 60 for total minutes, or split off the whole hours and multiply only the remainder: 7.4 h is 7 hours plus 24 minutes, 2.3 h is 2 h 18 min, and 4.6 h is 4 h 36 min.

Spreadsheets store time differently again. In Excel and Google Sheets a time is a fraction of a day, so 6:00 is 0.25. Multiply a time cell by 1,440, the number of minutes in a day, to get minutes, or by 24 to get decimal hours.

A day is 1,440 minutes, a week is 10,080 and an ordinary 365-day year is 525,600. A full-time schedule of 40 hours a week for 52 weeks adds up to 2,080 hours, which is 124,800 minutes; that is the figure many employers divide an annual salary by to get an hourly rate.

Big numbers of minutes make commitments easier to compare. A 45-minute commute each way, five days a week, is 450 minutes or 7.5 hours a week, about 390 hours over a 52-week year. To count down to a specific moment instead, the countdown timer shows the remaining hours and minutes live.

Airlines publish durations in hours and minutes, but layover rules and connection times are set in minutes, so converting helps when planning tight transfers. Remember that departure and arrival times are local; a 10-hour flight can land 1 or 19 hours later on the clock, which the time zone converter works out. For minutes back to hours, see minutes to hours.