Decimal time in Excel

Often the calculation is done in industrial time. For example, it is common to find values such as 8.75 or 4.25 in working hours. The latter does not mean 4 hours and 25 minutes, but 4 hours and 15 minutes. But how do I convert this? At 15, 30 or 45 minutes, it may still be possible to convert in your head, but within the quarter-hour steps, the industrial minute is not so easy to calculate.

Converting decimal minutes is particularly easy with Excel. Excel already calculates with converted values in the background. So 24h in Excel in the background are actually saved in a numerical value between 0 and 1.

Example: If we enter “12:00” in a field in Excel, Excel formats this as a time value.

If you than reformat this field as General (or number), “12:00” becomes “0.5”.

Of course this is also possible with any other time specification. So is
06:43 in Excel 0.2798611111111 or
15:28 for example 0.644444444444444
But even time specifications such as 146:17:52 (146 hours, 17 minutes and 52 seconds) are actually decimal numbers in Excel. Here: 6.09574074074074

How to convert minutes to decimal in Excel?

Nothing easier than that! We multiply our time (example 19:48) by 24, so if our time is in field A1, we have to enter “=A1*24” in the result field:

We will now reformat this field to “General” or number. With standard formatting, we see variable decimal places. When formatting as Number we can choose the number of decimal places.

Ready!