Subtraction of Time in Excel

As times are stored as simple decimal values, you can subtract time in Excel in the same way that you can subtract any other numbers. This is illustrated in the examples below.

Excel Time Subtraction Examples

The following spreadsheet shows four examples in which Excel times are subtracted.

The formulas used are shown in column C of the top spreadsheet and the results are shown in the spreadsheet below.

Note that, in the results spreadsheet of the above example, cells C2 and C3 are formatted with the time format hh:mmand cells C4 and C5 use the standard Excel Time format.