Unix timestamp converter
Paste a Unix timestamp to read it as a date, or pick a date to get the timestamp — the converter detects whether your number is in seconds or milliseconds and tells you which it assumed.
Result
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Read asSeconds
Current Unix time (Seconds)—
Current Unix time (Milliseconds)—
Timestamps worth knowing
Fixed points in the count. These do not change, so they are part of the page rather than something your browser has to compute.
| Timestamp | UTC | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z | The Unix epoch Where the count starts. |
| 1000000000 | 2001-09-09T01:46:40Z | One billion seconds Celebrated by a generation of engineers at their desks. |
| 1234567890 | 2009-02-13T23:31:30Z | The counting-up timestamp Nine consecutive digits, once. |
| 2147483647 | 2038-01-19T03:14:07Z | The 2038 problem The last second a signed 32-bit integer can hold. One tick later it goes negative. |
| 4102444800 | 2100-01-01T00:00:00Z | The year 2100 Still comfortably inside a 64-bit count. |
Common questions
- Seconds or milliseconds — how does it know?
- By size. A timestamp of 1e11 or more is treated as milliseconds, because 1e11 seconds is the year 5138 and nothing real reaches it. The detected unit is shown next to the result rather than applied silently, because guessing wrong is a factor-of-1000 error that lands you in 1970.
- What is a Unix timestamp?
- The number of seconds since 1 January 1970 at 00:00:00 UTC, not counting leap seconds. It is a single number with no time zone attached, which is exactly why systems use it: two machines anywhere on earth reading the same timestamp agree on the same instant.
- Can a timestamp be negative?
- Yes. Anything before 1970 is negative. The Apollo 11 landing is roughly -14,182,940. This converter handles negative values in both directions.
- What happens in 2038?
- Systems storing the count in a signed 32-bit integer run out of room at 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038. The next second overflows to a negative number, which those systems read as December 1901. Most modern platforms moved to 64-bit counts years ago; embedded and legacy systems are the ones still exposed.
- Does the time zone affect the timestamp?
- Not the timestamp itself — it is always counted from a UTC instant. The zone only decides how that instant is displayed as a date and time, and which local reading converts back to which number.