How to Calculate Elapsed Time in Minutes in Excel

Measure support response times in minutes, flag SLA breaches, and calculate the average response across tickets.

You will learn to

• Convert the gap between two timestamps into minutes
• Compare elapsed minutes with a target
• Average elapsed time across rows

How it works

Subtracting two date-time values gives the elapsed time as a fraction of a day. Multiply by 1440 — the number of minutes in a day — to get minutes: =(C2-B2)*1440. Because full timestamps include the date, this also works when the second time is on a later day.

Avoid MINUTE(C2-B2): it returns only the minutes part of the gap (0–59), not the total. To average many gaps without a helper column, subtract the totals: =(SUM(C2:C6)-SUM(B2:B6))*1440/COUNT(B2:B6).

=(C2-B2)*1440