There are several date and time functions in Google Sheets. But to add hours, minutes or seconds to time or date, none of them are required.

In the past, I have shared many ideas related to manipulating date and time in Google Sheets (find the link at the last part of this post). Here is a new addition to that awesome list.

This post contains some quick tips to help you add hours, minutes, or seconds to date or time in Google Sheets.

Let me start with one example.

Note: Other than my formulas you may need to apply Spreadsheet formatting to the result column. That I will mention wherever required. So here we go!

How to Add Hours with Time in Google Sheets

In this example assume cell A5 contains the time 10:25:00 (24 hr format) and cell B5 contains the hours 2 as a plain number.

The time cell A5 can be 24 hr format or 12 hr format. It’s not going to affect our formula. To add hours with time in Google Sheets, use the below formula.

Please note that, as you may already know, one day is equal to 24 hours, or 1440 minutes (24*60) or 86400 seconds (24*60*60). That’s what I am going to apply in my calculations/formulas below.

Formula # 1:

=A5+B5/24

It will return the time 12:25:00 after adding the number to it.

You can use this formula as an Array Formula to add times in column A with hours in Column B as below.

Formula # 2:

=ArrayFormula(if(len(A2:A),A2:A+B2:B/24,))

The output will be in time value. So format it back to time format, that you can quickly do as follows.

Select the output range C2:C and then go to the Format menu and there click on Number > Time.

When you want to add a few hours with start time as above, I recommend you to add hours to timestamp aka date time. This has one sheer advantage. What’s that?

Assume, your start time is 23/03/2019 23:00:00 (column A), that means in timestamp format.

Here the same above Array Formula works in column C. But the formatting of the output in column C must be different. Here format the output to time value from the menu Format > Number > Date Time.

There result will be 24/03/19 02:00:00. This enables you to clearly understand the job completion time is on the next day.

How to Add Minutes with Time in Google Sheets

I want to add minutes to time. So instead of dividing the minutes in number format by 24, divide it by 1440. I have already explained how I have reached this number 1440.

Example:

Cell A3 contains the time 16:30:00. How to add 150 minutes with this time in Google Sheets?

Formula # 3:

=A3+B3/1440

Similar to adding hours with time, here also we can use an array formula.

Formula # 4:

=ArrayFormula(if(len(A2:A),A2:A+B2:B/1440,))

Do format the column that contains the formula output to time.

How to add minutes with timestamp then? No changes. Just format the output to Date time.

How to Add Seconds with Time in Google Sheets

In this tutorial on how to add hours, minutes, seconds to time/date in Google Sheets, I have completed the first two. I hope you could understand those formulas. The one that left is adding seconds to time.

Most of the cases in real-life, you may not want to add seconds with time, right? Even if you want you can follow the above example, I mean how to add minutes to time in Google Sheets, to do that.

In that just replace the value 1440 with 86400. So I am not detailing that again here.

Additional Resources:

1. Create a Countdown Timer Using Built-in Functions in Google Sheets.
2. How to Check Time Input in a Range of Cells in Google Sheets.
3. Elapsed Days and Time Between Two Dates in Google Sheets.
4. How to Convert Military Time in Google Sheets.
5. COUNTIFS in a Time Range in Google Sheets.
6. The Best Overtime Calculation Formula.
7. How to Format Date, Time, and Number in Google Sheets Query.