How many minutes are in a day?

A day has 86,400 seconds: 1,440 minutes × 60 seconds. Counting from hours gives the same number. One hour has 3,600 seconds (60 minutes × 60 seconds), and 24 hours × 3,600 seconds = 86,400 seconds.

Computers often count time in milliseconds, which are thousandths of a second. A day has 86,400,000 milliseconds: 86,400 seconds × 1,000 milliseconds in each second.

A day has 24 hours, counted from one midnight to the next. The hour hand of a clock with twelve numbers goes around twice in a day, once for the hours before noon and once for the hours after noon. That is why times are written with AM and PM. Half a day is 12 hours.

Two days of the year are a different length on the clock in places that use daylight saving time, the practice of setting clocks one hour ahead for the warmer months. In most of the United States the clocks move forward on the second Sunday of March, and that day has 23 hours, or 1,380 minutes. The clocks move back on the first Sunday of November, and that day has 25 hours, or 1,500 minutes. Every other day of the year has 24 hours, or 1,440 minutes.

A week has 10,080 minutes: 7 days × 1,440 minutes. Counting from hours gives the same number, because a week has 168 hours and 168 × 60 = 10,080.

A work week of 40 hours, a common full-time schedule, takes 2,400 of the 10,080 minutes in a week. How the hours of a week divide between weekdays and the weekend is worked out on how many hours are in a week.

A week has 604,800 seconds: 10,080 minutes × 60 seconds. Counting by days gives the same number: 7 days × 86,400 seconds = 604,800.

A common year has 525,600 minutes: 365 days × 1,440 minutes. A common year is a year of 365 days, which is most years.

A leap year has 527,040 minutes: 366 days × 1,440 minutes. A leap year is a year with one extra day, February 29, and the next leap year is 2028. A leap year has 1,440 more minutes than a common year, which are the minutes of that one extra day. The hours of a year, and how people tend to spend them, are on how many hours are in a year.

A common year has 31,536,000 seconds: 365 days × 86,400 seconds. Counting from minutes gives the same number, since 525,600 minutes × 60 = 31,536,000.

A leap year has 31,622,400 seconds: 366 days × 86,400 seconds. A leap year is a year with one extra day, February 29, so it has 86,400 more seconds than a common year.

One minute is one part in 1,440 of a day, because a day has 1,440 minutes. That share is too small to picture. A more useful size is one percent of a day, which is 14.4 minutes: 1,440 minutes ÷ 100. A quarter of an hour is therefore about one percent of the day, and a full hour is a little over four percent.

Short stretches of a day add up to more than they seem to. A few phone checks of a few minutes each can come to more than one percent of the day, and they are easy to forget by the evening.

Your own day has the same 1,440 minutes as everyone else’s, and the one open question is where they went. Memory is a poor guide to the answer, because long blocks such as work and sleep are easy to recall and the short stretches between them are not.

A written record is a better guide. Writing the day down in plain words, a few lines at a time, and adding the time up by category is called time journaling. For a first rough count without writing anything, the Where did my week go? calculator turns one typical day into a week of hours. The page on how many weeks are in a year counts the weeks and days of a whole year.

A day is too many minutes to add up in your head, so most of them are never counted at all.

A good way to count a day reads the time from what you already write or say about it, with no stopwatch running, and gives the total back in hours and minutes. Most journaling apps keep how the day felt. They do not say how many of its minutes went to work, to sleep or to a screen.

One app built for this is Think in Numbers, a smart journaling app with time tracking built in.

You write or say your day in your own words, as it happens or all at once. The app reads what you wrote and counts the hours that went to each part of it: work, sleep, meals, time with people, your phone, and the time you never mentioned (shown as unaccounted). Then it shows those hours over days and weeks. Insights over days, weeks and months show how one day compares with the days before it.

1. You write your day

2. It counts the hours

• Stretching0m
• Work0m
• Sleep0m
• Unaccounted24h

3. It shows your week

S

M

T

W

T

F

S

Stretching this week: 0m

On 6 of 7 days. The gap is the day without it.

An example day and week.

Play again

Write my first day

Download on the App StoreGet it on Google Play

Or scan with your phone's camera.

For iPhone and Android. Try it on your own day before you pay.