24-hour watch faces: military and arctic time, explained
A 24-hour watch face counts the whole day in one go — 00:00 at midnight through to 23:59 — with no AM/PM to second-guess. It is the format used by the military, pilots, sailors and polar crews. Here is what it is, why those jobs rely on it, and how to set it up on a Garmin.
What is a 24-hour watch face?
On a 24-hour face the time runs from 00:00 to 23:59 instead of resetting to 12 twice a day. Half past one in the afternoon is 13:30; eleven at night is 23:00. There are two flavours:
- Digital 24-hour — the readout simply shows a two-digit hour from 00 to 23. This is what most people mean, and it is one toggle away on almost any Garmin.
- Analog 24-hour dial — a rarer design where the hour hand makes one full turn per day rather than two. Midnight, noon and every hour sit at a fixed spot on the dial, so a glance tells you where you are in the day.
Why military time uses 24 hours
The armed forces dropped AM/PM for one simple reason: it removes ambiguity. When an order says "move at 0400," there is no way to read it as four in the afternoon. Every hour has a single, unmistakable name — "thirteen hundred," "zero dark thirty" — and written times line up neatly in logs and orders. Aviation and the maritime world adopted the same convention for the same reason, often paired with UTC ("Zulu") time so crews in different time zones share one clock.
Why the Arctic and Antarctic need it
Closer to the poles, the usual cue for "is it morning or evening?" disappears. During the polar day the sun never sets for weeks; during the polar night it never rises. AM/PM becomes meaningless when the sky looks the same at 3am and 3pm, so expedition crews, researchers and anyone working a long arctic shift lean on a 24-hour clock to keep day and night straight. A 24-hour analog dial helps even more: the single daily rotation shows at a glance whether you are in the small hours or the afternoon, even when the daylight gives nothing away.
The same logic helps shift workers, long-haul travellers and night crews anywhere — when your body clock and the sky disagree, a 24-hour readout keeps the day honest.
How to read a 24-hour time
For any afternoon or evening hour, add 12 to the 12-hour time: 1pm is 13:00, 6pm is 18:00, 9pm is 21:00. Midnight is 00:00 (sometimes written 24:00), and the morning hours stay the same with a leading zero — 7am is 07:00. After a day or two it becomes automatic.
Setting 24-hour time on a Garmin
You do not need a special face to read 24-hour time — most Garmin watches have a system-wide switch:
- On the watch, open Settings → System → Time → Time Format and choose 24-hour.
- Any digital face that follows the system setting will now show 00–23. Some faces also have their own 12/24-hour toggle in their settings — see how to customize a Garmin watch face.
For the full 24-hour analog dial — the one-rotation-a-day look — you need a face designed for it, since it is a different layout from a standard 12-hour dial. Faces that offer a military or "outdoor" mode, a sunrise/sunset arc, or a day/night band pair especially well with a 24-hour readout.
Battery and always-on
A 24-hour face costs no more power than any other — what matters is how it is drawn. Dark backgrounds and a restrained always-on display keep an AMOLED Garmin efficient; see do watch faces drain battery? for the details that actually move the needle.
A rugged 24-hour / military-style face is on the way to the collection. In the meantime, browse the live faces or the best Garmin watch faces by style.