Dev Tools
Timestamp Converter
Convert a Unix timestamp to a readable date, or the other way around, in your local time or UTC.
Timestamp → Date
Date → Timestamp
Related: the cron expression explainer for scheduling syntax instead of raw timestamps.
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent anywhere.
Learn about Unix timestamps
What a Unix timestamp actually is
It's the number of seconds that have passed since 00:00:00 UTC on January 1, 1970, a moment known as the Unix epoch. Programming languages and databases lean on it because it's just a plain number, which is easy to store, compare, and do math on, no matter what language or system is reading it.
Reading your results
Watch for seconds versus milliseconds. A lot of APIs and JavaScript's own Date.now() return milliseconds, which is 1,000 times a standard Unix timestamp. Pasting one where the other is expected produces a wildly wrong date, often landing somewhere around 1970 or thousands of years in the future.
Common questions
Why does the same timestamp show a different time on different tools? That's a timezone display difference, not a change to the timestamp itself. A Unix timestamp is timezone-independent by design, but whatever converts it into a readable date has to choose a timezone to display it in, whether that's local time or UTC.
What happens when timestamps run out in 2038? Systems that store a timestamp in a signed 32-bit integer will overflow on January 19, 2038, an issue known as the Year 2038 problem. It's largely a non-issue on modern systems that use 64-bit integers, but it still exists on some older or embedded ones.
Can a Unix timestamp be negative? Yes, and that represents a date before 1970. It's valid, and many systems handle it fine, though support for negative timestamps isn't universal.