Duration units and how they stack
Time durations are built from a simple ladder: 60 seconds make a minute, 60 minutes make an hour, 24 hours make a day and 7 days make a week. Unlike metric units, these steps are not powers of ten, so mental conversion is easier to get wrong.
This converter handles five units: Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days and Weeks. Internally everything is converted to seconds first. A minute is 60 seconds, an hour is 3,600, a day is 86,400 and a week is 604,800. Your value is multiplied by the source unit and divided by the target unit.
Because those definitions are fixed, they treat every day as exactly 24 hours and every week as exactly seven days. That is the standard way to convert lengths of time and it is accurate for durations.
Why people convert durations
Typical uses are turning a video length into minutes, working out how many hours a multi-day project represents, or checking how many seconds a timeout setting equals. Developers set cache expiry or session lifetimes in seconds and often think in hours or days.
Planning is another case. Project estimates in days can be turned into weeks for a schedule, or an event window of 90 minutes into hours for a calendar entry. Rates and billing can also depend on a unit conversion, such as converting minutes worked into hours.
If you need to convert a calendar date or timestamp rather than a duration, a duration converter is the wrong tool. The Timestamp Converter handles dates and Unix times instead.
How to convert time with this tool
- Type a number into the box under From. It starts at 1.
- Choose your unit from the From drop-down: Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days or Weeks.
- Choose the unit you want from the To drop-down.
- Read the result in the To box. It updates as you edit.
The default pair is Seconds to Minutes, so you will first see 0.016667. The answer is rounded to six decimal places, and the arithmetic runs in your browser without sending your input anywhere.
Worked examples and limits
A few checks you can reproduce: 90 minutes is 1.5 hours, 2 weeks is 14 days, and 1 day is 86,400 seconds.
Decimal results can be confusing. A result of 1.5 hours means one hour and thirty minutes, not one hour and fifty minutes. If you want hours and minutes, take the whole part as hours and multiply the decimal part by 60 for the minutes. The result of 0.016667 minutes similarly means one second.
This tool has no months or years. Their lengths vary (a month is 28 to 31 days, and a year is 365 or 366), so there is no single fixed factor for them. If you need those, count days between actual dates instead. Also note the tool cannot add or subtract durations, it only converts one value between units.