Calculating the Difference Between Two Time Periods in Java

In many real-world applications, such as attendance tracking or scheduling systems, you may need to measure the time elapsed between two timestamps.

Java offers a powerful java.time package to handle date and time operations effectively.

In this article, we’ll demonstrate how to compute the difference between two time periods in Java.

This tutorial is a continuation of the concept described in our C language lead article, but adapted to Java's modern time-handling features.

Required Imports

For this program, we’ll need:

import java.time.LocalDateTime;
import java.time.Duration;

Note: These classes allow us to represent date-time values and compute the duration between them.

Java Program: Calculate the Difference Between Two Time Periods

// DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TWO TIME PERIODS in Java using LocalDateTime
import java.util.Scanner;
import java.time.LocalDateTime;
import java.time.Duration;

public class Main {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        // Step-1 Define two LocalDateTime objects
        LocalDateTime startTime = LocalDateTime.of(2025, 5, 1, 10, 30, 0);
        LocalDateTime endTime = LocalDateTime.of(2025, 5, 9, 15, 45, 0);

        // Step-2 Calculate duration between the two time periods
        Duration duration = Duration.between(startTime, endTime);

        // Step-3 Extract hours, minutes, and seconds from the duration
        long totalSeconds = duration.getSeconds();
        long hours = totalSeconds / 3600;
        long minutes = (totalSeconds % 3600) / 60;
        long seconds = totalSeconds % 60;

        // Step-4 Display the result
        System.out.println("\nTIME DIFFERENCE: " + hours + " HOURS, " + minutes + " MINUTES, " + seconds + " SECONDS");
    }
}

Run

Output

Explanation

In this Java program:

• We use LocalDateTime to set the starting and ending points.

• The Duration.between() method computes the total difference in seconds.

• From that total, we calculate the number of hours, minutes, and seconds.

• The final output represents the precise difference in a human-readable format.

This approach is both precise and readable, making use of Java 8’s modern time-handling features.