The Excel TIME function assembles a valid Excel time from three plain numbers — an hour, a minute, and a second. It is the safe way to build times in formulas: no quoting, no text parsing, no guessing. The key to mastering it is one idea: Excel stores every time as a fraction of a 24-hour day, so noon is 0.5 and 6:00 PM is 0.75. TIME builds that fraction for you. Pair it with DATE for full timestamps, and with HOUR, MINUTE, and SECOND to take times apart again.
2:30 PM. Under the hood Excel stores 0.6041667 — the fraction of the day that has elapsed by 2:30 PM.
Syntax
| Argument | Description | |
|---|---|---|
hour | Required | 0–32767. Values of 24 or more roll over: TIME(27,0,0) = 3:00 AM. Decimals are truncated. |
minute | Required | 0–32767. Values over 59 spill into hours: TIME(0,90,0) = 1:30 AM. |
second | Required | 0–32767. Values over 59 spill into minutes: TIME(0,0,3661) = 1:01:01 AM. |
How Excel stores times: a time is a decimal fraction of one day. Midnight is 0, 6:00 AM is 0.25, noon is 0.5, 6:00 PM is 0.75. TIME always returns a value from 0 up to (but never reaching) 1 — whole days are discarded. Available in every version of Excel.
Build times from hour, minute, second
Hours sit in column A, minutes in B, seconds in C. One formula in column D turns each row into a real Excel time; column E shows the day-fraction Excel actually stores:
| A | B | C | D | E | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hour | Minute | Second | =TIME(A,B,C) | Stored value |
| 2 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 9:00 AM | 0.375 |
| 3 | 14 | 30 | 0 | 2:30 PM | 0.6041667 |
| 4 | 18 | 45 | 30 | 6:45:30 PM | 0.7815972 |
| 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 12:00 AM | 0 |
Because the result is a genuine numeric time — not text — you can sort it, chart it, subtract it, and feed it to any other function. Combine it with DATE to build a full timestamp:
Try it: interactive TIME demo
Step the hour, minute, and second arguments and watch both the formatted time and the day-fraction Excel stores. Push minutes past 59 or hours past 23 to see the overflow rules.
Overflow, midnight rollover, and time math
Minutes and seconds beyond the usual range are perfectly legal — TIME normalizes them. That makes it ideal for shifting a time by an interval:
Hours of 24 or more wrap around midnight, and the whole days vanish:
That rollover is a feature for clock times but a trap for durations. If 9:00 PM plus 5 hours should land on 2:00 AM tomorrow, add the day fraction directly instead, because plain arithmetic carries the day:
Rule of thumb: divide by 24 for hours, 1440 for minutes, 86400 for seconds — each converts a plain number into a day fraction you can add to any date or time.
Errors & common pitfalls
#NUM! — a negative argument. TIME accepts 0 to 32767 for each argument. =TIME(-1, 0, 0) or =TIME(8, -30, 0) fails. To move backwards in time, subtract instead: =A2 - TIME(0, 30, 0).
Pitfall: you see 0.604167 instead of 2:30 PM. The formula worked — the cell is just formatted as General. Apply a time format (Ctrl+1 › Time, or the format code h:mm AM/PM) and the fraction displays as a clock time.
Pitfall: silent midnight rollover. =TIME(20,0,0) + TIME(8,0,0) displays 4:00 AM, and the fact that it is the next day is gone. When the date matters, work with full DATE+TIME timestamps, not bare times.
Pitfall: durations over 24 hours. TIME cannot represent 26 elapsed hours — it wraps to 2:00 AM. For durations, sum day fractions and format the cell as [h]:mm; the square brackets let hours run past 24.
Pitfall: decimals are truncated, not rounded. =TIME(8, 30.9, 0) is 8:30, not 8:31. Convert fractional minutes to seconds yourself: =TIME(8, 30, 54).
Practice workbook
Frequently asked questions
Why does TIME show a decimal like 0.604167 instead of a time?
How do I add hours or minutes to a time in Excel?
=A2+TIME(0,90,0) adds 90 minutes. Or add a day fraction directly: =A2+5/24 adds 5 hours, =A2+90/1440 adds 90 minutes. The fraction method also carries past midnight into the next day when A2 holds a full date-time.Why does TIME(25,0,0) return 1:00 AM?
Can TIME return a negative time?
=A2-TIME(1,30,0).What's the difference between TIME and TIMEVALUE?
=TIME(14,30,0). TIMEVALUE parses a time from text: =TIMEVALUE("2:30 PM"). Both return the same day fraction; choose based on what you have.Master functions like this in one day
This page covers one function. Our Excel Formulas and Functions class covers the 30 that matter most — live, hands-on, taught by professionals in Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, Oklahoma City, Denver, or online.
See the Formulas & Functions Class