Elapsed Time Question Generator

Builds a sheet of elapsed-time questions at the level you ask for. Times are 24-hour throughout, and the stretch level deliberately crosses midnight, which is where counting on stops working. Every question is computed and checked directly — not a fabricated or AI-guessed fact.

How many questions

Between 1 and 30. The sheet below shows how many pages they take.

Level

Seed (optional)

A word reproduces the same sheet, so a whole class can be given the identical set.

Gentle uses five-minute steps and short gaps. Standard adds finding a start time; stretch crosses midnight, where counting on stops working.

Paper size

Print size

Margin

Millimetres of blank edge, 5 to 40.

Turn the paper sideways

Room to answer in

How to print this, or save it as a PDF

There is no PDF to download, and there does not need to be. Open the print command in your browser and choose “Save as PDF” as the destination. The page addresses and dates a browser normally prints across the top and bottom are already kept off.
Set the scale to 100%, not “fit to page”. This sheet is already the exact size of the paper you chose, so anything that resizes it makes every measurement on it wrong.
Leave the paper size in the dialog set to the same one you chose here.

Your questions will appear here.

What this generator does

Generates elapsed time questions with answers — how long between two times, including intervals that cross midday, midnight and the hour. Those crossings are the whole difficulty, and a generator can guarantee they appear where a hand-written sheet usually does not.

How to use this tool

Choose a level and how many questions you want.
Press make questions and work through the sheet.
Show the answers to mark it, or show the working to see where the count was broken at the hour or at midnight.
Enter a seed word to rebuild the same sheet later.

Worked examples

Across midnight, stretch level, seed round9: A shift from 22:52 to 02:12 the next morning → 3 hours and 20 minutes: 68 minutes to midnight, then 132 after it.

Common use cases

Elapsed-time practice at home or school
Quick maths warm-ups
Self-testing before a maths quiz

How this generator works

A start time and a duration are drawn separately and added using 60-minute, 24-hour arithmetic rather than decimal arithmetic, so a duration of 45 minutes added to 23:40 correctly rolls over to 00:25 the next day. At stretch level the shift questions are constrained so the interval genuinely spans midnight; other questions at any level cross it only when the draw happens to.

Randomness and fairness

Start times and durations are drawn with the browser's cryptographic random number generator. A question that says it crosses midnight is constrained to actually do so, rather than being described that way and finishing at ten to twelve. A seed word rebuilds the same sheet later unless the generator has changed since; a seed is for reproducibility, not cryptographic strength, so a seeded sheet is deterministic rather than unpredictable.

For how randomness is produced across the whole site, see how Generate Random works.

Limitations and good to know

There is no clock face. The times are written, so this practises the arithmetic rather than reading hands.
Everything is inside one day or the night after it. Durations spanning several days, and anything involving a date, are not asked.
Time zones and daylight saving are not modelled. The hour that vanishes in spring makes some real elapsed-time questions genuinely harder than any of these.

Common mistakes

Subtracting times as if they were decimals: 14:10 minus 13:45 is 25 minutes, not 0.65 of anything. Count on through the hour instead.
Losing a day across midnight: An interval from 23:30 to 01:15 is one hour forty-five, not twenty-two hours the other way. Check which direction the question means.