Calculating the Difference Between Two Time Periods in R

R is a powerful language primarily used in data analysis, statistics, and scientific computing. Time-based calculations are commonly used in R for time series data, experiments, or event log analysis.

R provides built-in support for handling date-time objects and computing differences between them.

In this sub-article, we’ll create a simple R script that calculates the difference between two time points using the as.POSIXct() function. This example is derived from our lead C article but adapted for R's syntax and capabilities.

R Program: Calculate the Difference Between Two Time Periods

# DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TWO TIME PERIODS in R using POSIXct

# Step-1 Define the start and end times
start_time <- as.POSIXct("2026-01-10 08:15:00", format = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
end_time   <- as.POSIXct("2026-01-18 12:40:30", format = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")

# Step-2 Calculate the time difference
time_diff <- difftime(end_time, start_time, units = "secs")

# Step-3 Convert seconds into hours, minutes, and seconds
total_seconds <- as.numeric(time_diff)
hours   <- floor(total_seconds / 3600)
minutes <- floor((total_seconds %% 3600) / 60)
seconds <- total_seconds %% 60

# Step-4 Display the result
cat("\nTIME DIFFERENCE:", hours, "HOURS,", minutes, "MINUTES,", round(seconds), "SECONDS\n")

Output

Explanation

• as.POSIXct() converts date-time strings into R's internal time format.

• difftime() gives the difference in specified units (here, seconds).

• The result is converted to numeric and then broken down into hours, minutes, and seconds.

This method is ideal in data analysis tasks such as duration tracking in experiments, log evaluation, and comparing timestamps in datasets.

Extra Metric: Total Time in Hours (Decimal)

To calculate the total time difference as a floating-point number of hours (for reporting or visualization):

total_hours_decimal <- round(total_seconds / 3600, 2)

cat("TOTAL TIME IN HOURS:", total_hours_decimal, "\n")

Output

This can be helpful in statistical summaries, efficiency analysis, or graphical plots.