Unix Timestamp Converter
Convert between Unix timestamps and human-readable dates — live ticker included.
What is a Unix timestamp?
A Unix timestamp (also called epoch time or POSIX time) is the number of seconds that have elapsed since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970 — the Unix epoch. It is the most widely used way to represent time in programming because it is a single integer, timezone-agnostic, and trivially comparable. Millisecond-precision variants (multiply by 1,000) are common in JavaScript and modern databases.
Frequently asked questions
How do I tell if a timestamp is in seconds or milliseconds?
A 10-digit number is almost certainly seconds. A 13-digit number is almost certainly milliseconds. The converter auto-detects: any value over 10 000 000 000 (10 billion) is treated as milliseconds.
What is the Year 2038 problem?
On 32-bit systems, Unix timestamps are stored as a signed 32-bit integer, which overflows at 2,147,483,647 — 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038. After that point, the counter wraps to a large negative number. 64-bit systems (used by all modern hardware and software) do not have this problem and can represent dates billions of years into the future.
What is ISO 8601?
ISO 8601 is the international standard for date and time notation. The format looks like 2024-06-15T10:30:00.000Z — year, month, day, a T separator, hours, minutes, seconds, and a Z suffix indicating UTC. It is sortable as a string and unambiguous across locales.
