Hours to Days (h to d)
1 hour equals 0.04166666667 days (rounded).
How to convert hours to days
To convert hours to days, multiply the number of hours by 0.04166666667. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply days by 24.
days = hours × 0.04166666667
Example: 10 hours = 0.4166666667 days.
Months and years are not constant. This site uses the average Gregorian year of 365.2425 days, so one 'year' converts to 365.2425 days, not 365; use 'common year' for exactly 365 days.
About these units
Hour (h)
60 minutes or 3,600 seconds, one twenty-fourth of a mean solar day.
Egyptian astronomers gave us the twelve. Coffin lids from about 2150 BC show the night divided into exactly 12 intervals, tied to the rising of star groups called decans, and the day was later split into 12 hours with sundials. These were seasonal hours, a twelfth of the daylight, so a summer hour was longer than a winter one. The word itself comes from Greek hora, originally any span of time, through Latin and Old French into English in the 13th century.
Equal hours of 1/24 of a day were probably first proposed by Hipparchus, and mechanical clocks made them the practical choice, since a clock showing seasonal hours had to be readjusted every morning and evening. Today the hour is exactly 3,600 seconds and is a non-SI unit accepted for use with the SI. Civil time still bends it a little: UTC hours have lasted 3,601 seconds 27 times since 1972 to keep clocks within 0.9 seconds of the Earth's rotation. In practice we use it for working shifts, travel times and electricity bills measured in kilowatt-hours.
1 hour = 3,600 seconds (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Hour; BIPM: SI Brochure, 9th edition
Day (d)
24 hours or 86,400 seconds. The mean solar day; the actual rotation of the Earth is about 4 minutes shorter (see sidereal day).
Old English dæg is the root of our day, with close cousins in German Tag, Dutch dag and Icelandic dagur, all descending from Proto-Germanic dagaz. It is the oldest unit here, because the cycle of light and dark needs no instrument. Yet the day we count is a constructed average: the actual interval from one noon to the next varies through the year by up to about 7.9 seconds, because Earth's orbit is elliptical and its axis is tilted.
Astronomers smooth this out with a fictitious mean Sun, giving the mean solar day, and the day in the SI sense is fixed at exactly 86,400 seconds. Reality has drifted slightly: the mean solar day has recently averaged about 86,400.002 seconds, and tidal drag from the Moon is lengthening it by about 2 milliseconds per century. That is why 27 leap seconds were added to UTC between 1972 and 2022. One rotation measured against the distant stars is shorter, about 23 hours 56 minutes 4.09 seconds, and a year contains one more of these sidereal days than solar days.
1 day = 86,400 seconds (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Day; BIPM: SI Brochure, 9th edition
Related conversions
- Days to hours (reverse)
- Hours to seconds
- Hours to minutes
- Hours to weeks
- Hours to months
- Hours to years
- Hours to milliseconds
- Hours to microseconds
- Hours to nanoseconds
- Hours to decades
- Hours to centuries
- Hours to millennia
- Hours to picoseconds
- Seconds to days
- Minutes to days
- Weeks to days
- Months to days
- Years to days
- Milliseconds to days
- Microseconds to days
- Nanoseconds to days
- Decades to days
- Centuries to days
- Millennia to days
- Picoseconds to days
See all time units.