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Free online Unix timestamp converter — convert timestamps to readable dates and back. Get current epoch time with live clock display.
A Unix timestamp (also known as Epoch time) is the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970 (midnight UTC). It is a simple, universal way to represent points in time without timezone ambiguity. Unix timestamps are widely used in APIs, databases, log files, and programming languages as a standard time representation.
Most programming languages and databases store times as Unix timestamps internally. JavaScript uses milliseconds since epoch (Date.now()), while PHP, Python, and most databases use seconds. Converting between timestamps and human-readable dates is a common task in development, debugging, and data analysis.
Timezones add complexity to timestamp interpretation. A Unix timestamp represents the same instant globally, but its human-readable meaning differs by timezone. For example, timestamp 1717200000 is 2024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC but 2024-06-01 08:00:00 in Shanghai (UTC+8). Always store and transmit timestamps in UTC, convert to local time only for display.
Common timestamp patterns include: validating token expiration (checking if a timestamp is in the past), logging events with precise timing, scheduling future actions, measuring performance (elapsed time between two timestamps), and syncing data across distributed systems where each node may have slight clock differences.
This tool provides two conversion modes. Timestamp to Date converts Unix seconds to a formatted date string. Date to Timestamp converts a date-time input back to Unix seconds. The live display of the current timestamp helps you quickly grab the current epoch time for use in your code or API calls.
Many systems use a signed 32-bit integer for timestamps, which overflows on January 19, 2038 (2,147,483,647 seconds after epoch). Modern systems use 64-bit integers or unsigned types to avoid this. All major platforms (Linux 64-bit, Node.js, Python 3) are already 2038-safe.
JavaScript's Date.now() returns milliseconds since epoch (1/1000 of a second), not seconds. To get Unix seconds, divide by 1000 and floor: Math.floor(Date.now() / 1000). Many JavaScript APIs (like JWT expiration) expect seconds, which is a common source of bugs.
Technically, UTC is an atomic time standard while GMT is a time zone based on solar time. For practical purposes in computing, they are interchangeable. Both represent the same reference time without daylight saving adjustments.
Best practice: store all timestamps in UTC, convert to local time only for display. When accepting user input, always convert to UTC before storing. Use libraries like date-fns-tz or Luxon for timezone-aware formatting.