Unix Timestamp Converter

Convert a Unix timestamp into a readable date, or a date back into a timestamp. Leave the field empty to see the current time in every format.

The unit is detected automatically — seconds, milliseconds, microseconds or nanoseconds — because a mismatch there is the usual reason a date comes out as 1970 or some year in the far future.

How it works

A Unix timestamp counts the seconds elapsed since 1 January 1970 00:00:00 UTC, known as the epoch. It is a single integer with no timezone, which is exactly why it is used for storing and transmitting time: there is nothing to misinterpret until you deliberately format it for a human.

Units are the usual source of confusion. Different ecosystems default to different precision, and the numbers look similar enough to mix up:

• Seconds — 10 digits. PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, Unix tools.
• Milliseconds — 13 digits. JavaScript's Date.now(), Java, and most JSON APIs written in either.
• Microseconds — 16 digits. Postgres internals, some tracing systems.
• Nanoseconds — 19 digits. Go's UnixNano(), Prometheus.

Feeding milliseconds to something expecting seconds puts you roughly 50,000 years in the future; the reverse lands you in January 1970. If a date looks absurd, check the digit count first.

Two more traps worth knowing. Timestamps have no timezone — the same integer is one instant everywhere, and the timezone only affects how it is displayed. And 2038: systems storing timestamps as signed 32-bit integers overflow on 19 January 2038. Most modern software uses 64-bit and is fine, but embedded systems and old database columns are not.

Frequently asked questions