Unix Timestamp Converter

A Unix timestamp is the number of seconds that have elapsed since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970 (the Unix epoch), not counting leap seconds. It is a simple, timezone-independent way to represent a single instant in time, used throughout programming and databases.

Epoch time is another name for Unix time — the count of seconds since the Unix epoch, 1 January 1970 UTC. The terms “Unix time”, “Epoch time” and “POSIX time” all mean the same thing.

POSIX time is the formal name for Unix time as defined by the POSIX standard: seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. It deliberately ignores leap seconds so that every day is exactly 86,400 seconds long.

UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) is the global time standard against which all timezones are offset. It does not change for daylight saving. Unix timestamps are always measured in UTC, which is why the same timestamp means the same instant everywhere on Earth.

ISO-8601 is the international standard for writing dates and times as text, such as 2024-06-20T08:00:00Z. It orders fields from largest to smallest (year, month, day, hour…), uses a T between date and time, and a Z (or an offset like +05:30) to indicate the timezone.

1 January 1970 was chosen as the Unix epoch — time zero — by the engineers who built early Unix systems in the early 1970s. It was a recent, convenient round date, and it has been the reference point for computer time ever since.

Multiply the timestamp by 1000 to get milliseconds, then create a date from it — for example new Date(timestamp * 1000) in JavaScript. This tool does it instantly and shows the result in UTC, your local time and any timezone.

Parse the date into an instant and divide the milliseconds by 1000. In JavaScript that is Math.floor(new Date("2024-06-20").getTime() / 1000). Enter any date above and the tool returns the Unix seconds, milliseconds and more.

A millisecond timestamp counts milliseconds (thousandths of a second) since the Unix epoch instead of seconds, so it is 1,000 times larger. JavaScript’s Date.now() returns milliseconds, which is why JS timestamps have 13 digits while second-based ones have 10.

Some systems need finer precision: microseconds are millionths of a second (16-digit timestamps) and nanoseconds are billionths (19-digit). Databases, tracing systems and high-frequency applications use them. This tool detects and converts all four precisions.

Unix time is exact to its chosen precision (second, millisecond, etc.), but it ignores leap seconds — occasional one-second adjustments to UTC. For almost all applications this is irrelevant; only specialised scientific timing needs to account for leap seconds.

They don’t — a Unix timestamp is a single UTC instant with no timezone attached. Timezones only matter when you display that instant as a human-readable date: the same timestamp shows as different local times around the world. This tool lets you view any timestamp in any timezone.

In everyday use they are interchangeable and share the same offset (+00:00). The difference is technical: GMT is a timezone based on the Earth’s rotation, while UTC is a precise atomic time standard kept within 0.9 seconds of GMT. Computers use UTC.

Systems that store Unix time in a signed 32-bit integer can only count up to 2,147,483,647 seconds, which is reached at 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038. After that the value overflows. The fix is to use 64-bit timestamps, which most modern systems already do.

RFC 2822 is the date format used in email headers, like “Thu, 20 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000”. It includes the weekday, day, month name, year, time and timezone offset.

RFC 3339 is a strict profile of ISO-8601 used in internet protocols and APIs, like 2024-06-20T08:00:00Z. It always includes a timezone (Z or an offset), making it unambiguous.

The live dashboard on this page shows the current Unix timestamp in seconds and milliseconds, updating every second. In code, use Math.floor(Date.now() / 1000) in JavaScript or time.time() in Python.

DST is the practice of moving clocks forward (usually one hour) in spring and back in autumn to make better use of daylight. It changes a timezone’s offset for part of the year, which the DST analyzer on this page detects automatically for any zone.

No. The timestamp itself is pure UTC and never shifts. Only the displayed local time changes when DST starts or ends, because the timezone’s offset from UTC changes.

A leap year has 366 days, with an extra day (29 February). A year is a leap year if it is divisible by 4, except century years which must also be divisible by 400 — so 2000 was a leap year but 1900 was not.

A day is 86,400 seconds, a week is 604,800, and a (non-leap) year is 31,536,000 seconds. A leap year has 31,622,400. Unix time treats every day as exactly 86,400 seconds.

Timestamps are compact, sortable, language-independent and unambiguous. Storing a single number avoids timezone and formatting confusion, makes date arithmetic trivial (just add seconds), and works identically across databases, APIs and programming languages.

Subtract one timestamp from the other to get the difference in seconds, then break it into days, hours and minutes. The Difference & Duration tab does this, also showing calendar-aware years/months and business-day counts.

Relative time expresses an instant compared to now, like “5 minutes ago” or “in 3 days”, instead of an absolute date. It is common in social feeds and notifications; this tool generates it for any timestamp.

Yes. Dates before the Unix epoch (1 January 1970) are represented as negative numbers — for example −86400 is 31 December 1969. This tool handles negative timestamps correctly.

Pick the target timezone in the converter and the human-readable output updates instantly with the correct offset and DST. The timezone table also shows the same instant across many zones at once.

Yes. It uses the browser’s built-in IANA timezone database via the Intl API, so every offset and daylight-saving transition is calculated exactly the same way operating systems do.

Yes. It is completely free with no sign-up, runs entirely in your browser so nothing is sent to a server, and works offline once loaded. Your history and favourites are stored only on your device.

Yes. The batch converter accepts multiple lines, comma-separated values or pasted CSV/JSON and converts every timestamp at once. The log analyzer extracts and converts timestamps embedded in log files.

The developer tab generates copy-ready snippets for JavaScript, Python, PHP, Java, C#, Go, Ruby, Rust, Kotlin, Swift and SQL (MySQL and PostgreSQL), all using the timestamp you entered.