hour (h)
1 hour = 3,600 seconds
What is hour?
An hour is a unit of time equal to 60 minutes. It is the standard unit for time-of-day references, work schedules, travel durations, and billing periods across most global contexts.
Notes: Time unit
Real-world uses
Hours are the primary unit for work schedules, flight durations, parking meters, and time zone offsets. Labour laws define maximum working hours, and electricity billing is based on kilowatt-hours of consumption.
History
The concept of dividing the day into 24 hours dates to ancient Egypt, where daylight and night were each split into 12 parts. These "hours" varied in length seasonally until mechanical clocks standardized equal hours in medieval Europe.
Common mistakes
Converting hours to minutes by multiplying by 100 instead of 60. Also, confusing 12-hour and 24-hour time formats—"12:00 AM" is midnight, not noon, which frequently causes scheduling errors.
When is this conversion used?
Converting hour to second is useful in the time domain when comparing values across different measurement standards or applying formulas that require a specific unit.
How to convert hour to second
To convert hour to second, multiply the value by 3,600.
Conversion formula (from base unit)
x * 3600.0
Measurement standards
The SI second is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom, maintained by the BIPM and national metrology institutes worldwide.
Did you know?
Earth's rotation is gradually slowing due to tidal friction with the Moon. To keep atomic time aligned with solar time, "leap seconds" have been inserted 27 times since 1972 — though they are scheduled to be abolished by 2035.
| hours | seconds |
|---|---|
| 0.1 | 360 |
| 0.5 | 1,800 |
| 1 | 3,600 |
| 2 | 7,200 |
| 5 | 18,000 |
| 10 | 36,000 |
| 25 | 90,000 |
| 50 | 180,000 |
| 100 | 360,000 |
| 250 | 900,000 |
| 500 | 1,800,000 |
| 1,000 | 3,600,000 |
Common values
| hours | seconds | |
|---|---|---|
| Blink of an eye | 0.00008333 hours | 0.3 seconds |
| Average pop song | 0.05833333 hours | 210 seconds |
| Feature film | 2 hours | 7,200 seconds |
| One work day (8 hrs) | 8 hours | 28,800 seconds |
| One calendar year | 8,760 hours | 31,536,000 seconds |
Full hour conversion table
| Unit | Value | Factor |
|---|---|---|
| second | 1 h = 3,600 s | × 3,600 |
| minute | 1 h = 60 min | × 60 |
| day | 1 h = 0.04166667 d | × 0.04166667 |
| week | 1 h = 0.00595238 wk | × 0.00595238 |
| year (365 d) | 1 h = 0.00011416 yr | × 0.00011416 |
| millisecond | 1 h = 3,600,000 ms | × 3,600,000 |
| microsecond | 1 h = 3.600000e+09 µs | × 3.600000e+09 |
| nanosecond | 1 h = 3.600000e+12 ns | × 3.600000e+12 |
| century (100 yr) | 1 h = 0.00000114 century | × 0.00000114 |