Hours to Seconds Calculator

Time and seconds form the outer limits of everyday timekeeping. Hours are the base unit for planning your day while seconds are the unit used to measure things like stopwatches, physics problems or lines of code. Since an hour is exactly 3,600 seconds, converting between these two units is a frequent requirement.

This calculator converts time in seconds and allows you to represent the same amount of time in different ways: either as a number of seconds only, or using hours-minutes-seconds notation, or as decimals for hours and minutes. You can also switch between seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months and years as input units to perform conversions.

To convert hours to seconds, do the following:

Since there are 3,600 seconds in an hour, you can convert hours into seconds by multiplying the number of hours by 3,600. This will give you your final answer.

For example, 2 hours multiplied by 3,600 is 7,200 seconds while 8 hours multiplied by 3,600 is 28,800 seconds, which equates to a full working day. An hour is 3,600 seconds and a quarter of an hour is 900 seconds.

Why 3,600? A two-step conversion chain.

The number 3,600 is not arbitrary; if you replace it with either 60 or 100, you will easily make a mistake. Converting hours to seconds requires two steps because there are two levels of time between the units.

You multiply the hours by 60 to get minutes and then you multiply the minutes by 60 to get seconds. So since 60 times 60 is equal to 3,600, when directly converting from hours into seconds we use a factor of 3,600.

So 14 hours is the product of 14 and 60, times 60, which gives us 50,400 seconds. It's a common mistake to just multiply by 60 and skip that step, which would result in your answer being divided by 60.

Convert decimal hours to seconds:

Even though the hours are not stated as whole numbers, the rule of multiplying by 3600 does not change, but the decimal part can be confusing. 1.5 hours is neither 1 hour and 5 seconds nor 1 hour and 50 seconds.

The value is 5,400 seconds. The decimal portion represents a fraction of an hour; since there are 3,600 seconds in an hour, .5 hours would be 1,800 seconds, .25 hours would be 900 seconds and .1 hours would be 360 seconds (six minutes).

This calculator will also display the results in hours, minutes and seconds broken down so that you can say for example "1.5 is equal to 1 hour, 30 minutes and 0 seconds" instead of having to guess what the decimal part means.

How to convert seconds to hours.

The opposite conversion is just as easy. If you divide the number of seconds by 3600, you will have the number of hours. Enter the units in the calculator tool in seconds and read the result in hours.

So 3,600 seconds is an hour, 7,200 seconds is two hours and 1,800 seconds is half an hour. One second is one 3,600th of an hour and is about 0.000278 hours long.

Conversion table of hours to seconds.

Here are some useful guidelines for seconds and minutes. Multiply any intermediate values by 3,600.

Situations where converting to seconds is useful:

Many everyday conversions are done in the opposite direction. Seconds are converted to minutes or hours to make them easier to understand. Converting time to seconds is mainly for specialized applications and is useful in situations where a system measures time in its original number of seconds.

• In programming and servers, timeouts, cache TTLs, session and token expiration times, cron schedules are almost always expressed in seconds, so the rule of thumb is that "2 hours" becomes "7200".

• In science and technology, the second is the base unit of time in the International System of Units (SI), so durations are often expressed in seconds for formulas related to speed, frequency, and energy.

• In sports and fitness, play time and rest periods are measured in seconds so activities that are timed need to be converted into seconds for measurement.

• In media and encoding fields, video lengths, sampling rates, and frame calculations are usually expressed in seconds rather than hours or minutes.

A hierarchy of units of time.

Hours and seconds are on a stepped scale of time units, with each step being an integer multiple of the previous one. When you understand this scale, any conversion requires only simple multiplication or division.

• 1 minute = 60 seconds

• 1 hour = 60 minutes = 3,600 seconds

• 1 day = 24 hours = 1,440 minutes = 86,400 seconds.

• 1 week = 7 days = 168 hours = 604,800 seconds.

• 1 month (average) = 30.44 days = 2,629,800 seconds

• 1 year = 365.25 days = 8,766 hours = 31,557,600 seconds

Examples of calculations:

Here are some conversions demonstrated from beginning to end.

• To convert hours to seconds, multiply by 3,600. So 1 hour is equal to 3,600 seconds.

• To convert the time to seconds, multiply 2 by 3,600 which is 7,200 seconds or 120 minutes.

• If you convert the hours to seconds, then full-time work is 28,800 seconds, if you multiply 8 by 3,600.

• To convert an hour into seconds you multiply it by 14 and then again by 60 and then again by 60 which is 50,400 seconds.

• When you convert the time to seconds, multiplying 24 by 3,600 gives you 86,400 seconds in a day.

• To convert it back to hours, we divide by 3,600 again, which gives us 1 hour.

What is an hour?

An hour is a unit of time, abbreviated hr or h, and equal to one twenty-fourth of a day. It is equivalent to 60 minutes or 3,600 seconds. Although it is not an SI base unit, it can be used in conjunction with the metric system and is the most commonly used unit for scheduling appointments, wages, and travel times.

The division of a day into 24 hours and an hour into 60 minutes can be traced back to timekeeping in ancient Egypt and Babylon as well as the base-60 number system used by the Babylonians. This explains why there are 3,600 seconds in an hour rather than even 1,000 seconds.

What is a second?

The second is the SI base unit of time and is denoted by the symbol "s" or "sec". Since 1967 its definition has been based on physics rather than astronomy. The length of time it takes for 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a caesium-133 atom is one second and this is why the second underpins all types of timekeeping from GPS to internet clocks.

In everyday speech a second is one sixtieth of a minute, 3600th of an hour and 86400th of a day. A millisecond is one thousandth of a second. When the accuracy of a second is not enough, stopwatches or computer timers measure in milliseconds.

Note on months and years:

Days, weeks, hours, minutes and seconds are precise. A day always has 86,400 seconds. In contrast, months in a calendar have varying lengths, and a year is not a whole number of days, which makes month and year more complex.

For conversions over longer periods of time, this calculator uses an average of about 30.44 days per month (2,629,800 seconds) and 365.25 days per Julian year (31,557,600 seconds). This makes 12 average months exactly one year. For calculations involving precise numbers of months or specific calendar periods, the actual number of days should be used as a basis for calculation.

When this conversion is useful:

• In development and devops areas time based rules that are defined in hours will be converted to seconds required for timeouts, ttl values (time to live), schedulers.

• In physics and laboratory work, time before deployment is converted to SI seconds.

• In timing and sports activities, activity times are expressed in seconds so that they can be used on stopwatches or timekeeping systems.

• In learning units one can understand exactly how hours, minutes and seconds are converted step by step and why an hour is 3,600 seconds.

The conversion results are only for general reference information. Days and shorter units are accurate, but months and years use averages (an average month and a year of 365.25 days), so actual number of days should be calculated for specific calendar periods.