How Long Until 12:00 AM?
midnight — the start of a new calendar day
Time remaining until 00:00 tomorrow:
12:00 AM Around the World
When it is 12:00 AM in New York (EDT) today, the clocks elsewhere read:
Daylight saving time is applied for today's date, so these offsets change when clocks go forward or back. For other dates use the time zone converter.
What 12:00 AM Actually Means
12:00 AM falls exactly on the hour — the slot most appointments, shifts and deadlines are scheduled around.
12:00 AM is midnight. It is the exact instant a new calendar date begins: one second before it, you are still on yesterday's date; at 00:00:00 sharp, today becomes tomorrow. This makes midnight the most-watched moment of the entire day — people track it for everything from birthdays and New Year countdowns to software release schedules and deadline cutoffs.
Midnight is also the most ambiguously-labelled time in English. Technically, "12:00 AM" belongs to the new day, not the old one, but because "AM" literally means ante meridiem (before noon), many people find the convention confusing. Airlines, railways and release schedules often avoid it entirely: they write 00:01 or 23:59 instead of "midnight" to remove all doubt about which date is meant.
If you see a deadline written as "midnight Friday," it almost always means the end of Friday — that is, Saturday at 00:00. For important cutoffs, the convention is usually "23:59:59 on the stated date", which avoids the midnight ambiguity entirely.
Why People Count Down to 12:00 AM
- New Year's Eve countdowns and date-change milestones
- Project and deadline cutoffs
- Software deploy and release windows — midnight UTC is the industry default
- Birthday countdowns (the exact second the date changes)
- Late-shift clock-in and clock-out records
Is 12:00 AM Midnight or Noon?
12:00 AM is midnight — the first minute of a new day, written 00:00 on a 24-hour clock. So "Friday at 12:00 AM" means the very start of Friday (the night between Thursday and Friday), not the end of it. This is one of the most common sources of missed deadlines and mis-booked flights.
Because the convention is so easy to misread, many airlines, contracts and legal notices avoid it altogether and write 11:59 PM or 12:01 AM instead.
- date-change deadlines and submission cut-offs
- birthdays, anniversaries and New Year's countdowns
- product launches and daily resets
Did you know?
There are time zones that technically skip or repeat a midnight due to daylight saving time transitions. In Samoa, December 30 2011 was skipped entirely — midnight moved the country from the American side of the International Date Line to the Asian side.
Time Reference
How Long Is It From … to 12:00 AM?
The gap from common start times to 12:00 AM, counting forward (past midnight where needed) — handy for shift lengths, travel times and sleep.
Other Popular Hours
Frequently Asked Questions
When this page was loaded it was 17 hours and 27 minutes until 12:00 AM tomorrow in New York time. The live countdown at the top of the page recalculates from your own device clock every second, so it is always exact for your time zone.
12:00 AM is 00:00 on a 24-hour clock and 0000 hours in military time. It is 0 minutes after midnight, 0.0% of the way through the day.
12:00 AM is midnight — the very start of the day. In everyday English, morning runs from about 5 AM until noon, afternoon from noon until about 5 PM, evening from about 5 PM until 9 PM, and night after that. A deadline of "12:00 AM Friday" therefore means the start of Friday, not the end of it.
12:00 AM EDT (New York) is 9:00 PM in Los Angeles (previous day), 11:00 PM in Chicago (previous day), 4:00 AM in London, 1:00 PM in Tokyo. The table on this page lists more cities, and it updates to your own time zone when the page loads.