Unix timestamp converter (epoch ↔ date)
Convert a Unix timestamp to a human date, or a date back to epoch — in seconds or milliseconds, UTC and your local time, with the current Unix time ticking live. The unit is auto-detected, and every value is one tap to copy. No ads, no tracking.
Working with Unix time
A Unix timestamp is the simplest possible representation of an instant: one integer counting seconds from the epoch, 1 January 1970 at midnight UTC. Because it carries no time zone and no calendar quirks, it's what databases, log files, JWTs, HTTP headers and APIs almost universally use under the hood. The trouble is that a raw number like 1700000000 means nothing to a human — you need to convert it, and that's what this page is for.
Paste a timestamp and the converter detects whether it's in seconds, milliseconds, microseconds or nanoseconds from the number of digits, then renders it as an ISO 8601 string, a readable UTC date, your own local time, and a relative phrase like "2 hours ago". Go the other way by picking a date and time to get the epoch value back in both seconds and milliseconds. Every field copies to your clipboard with a single tap, so you can drop the value straight into code or a query.
A few things worth remembering: the timestamp itself is always UTC, so any local time you see is just a rendering for your zone; leap seconds are ignored by Unix time (it pretends every day is exactly 86,400 seconds); and if you're comparing a database value against JavaScript's Date.now(), watch the units — one is seconds, the other milliseconds, a factor of 1000 apart and a very common bug.
FAQ
What is a Unix timestamp?
The number of seconds that have elapsed since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970 — the Unix epoch. It's a single integer that represents an instant unambiguously, independent of any time zone, which is why it's the default way computers store time.
Seconds or milliseconds?
Unix time is classically in seconds (a 10-digit number today). JavaScript and many APIs use milliseconds (13 digits). This converter auto-detects which you pasted by its magnitude and also handles microseconds and nanoseconds.
Why doesn't the timestamp carry a time zone?
It doesn't need one — a Unix timestamp is an absolute instant in UTC. The same number is 'now' everywhere on Earth; only when you format it into a readable date does a time zone come in. This tool shows both the UTC value and your local rendering.
What happens in 2038?
Systems that store Unix time in a signed 32-bit integer overflow on 19 January 2038 (the 'Year 2038 problem'). Modern systems use 64-bit integers, which push the limit hundreds of billions of years out.