Epoch & Unix Timestamp Converter
Auto-detects seconds, milliseconds, microseconds, and nanoseconds.
What is a Unix timestamp?
A Unix timestamp (also called epoch time) is the number of seconds elapsed since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970 — a fixed reference point known as the Unix epoch. It is a plain integer, which makes it trivial to store, compare, and subtract across any language or database without worrying about time zones or calendar formats.
In practice you will encounter it in seconds (10 digits, used by most databases and APIs), milliseconds (13 digits, returned by JavaScript's Date.now()), microseconds (16 digits, common in distributed tracing), and nanoseconds (19 digits, used by Go and some observability systems). Paste any of them above — the unit is detected automatically.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my timestamp show 1970?
This is the most common timestamp bug. If your value is in milliseconds (13 digits) but is passed to a function expecting seconds (10 digits), the result lands very close to 1 January 1970. For example, 1700000000000 ms ÷ 1000 = 1700000000 s (November 2023). Paste your value above — TimeTools detects the unit automatically so you can confirm which one you actually have.
Seconds vs milliseconds — how does detection work?
The unit is inferred from the number of digits: ~10 digits is seconds, ~13 is milliseconds, ~16 is microseconds, ~19 is nanoseconds. The detected unit is always shown so you can confirm it at a glance. Fractional seconds (e.g. 1700000000.123) are also accepted.
Can Unix timestamps overflow?
32-bit signed integers overflow on 19 January 2038 at 03:14:07 UTC — the Year 2038 problem. This affects older C and embedded systems that store time as int32. Modern systems use 64-bit integers and won't overflow for hundreds of thousands of years. JavaScript's Date, which this tool uses, is safe until the year 275,760.
How are negative timestamps handled?
Negative Unix timestamps represent dates before 1 January 1970 UTC. For example, -86400 is 31 December 1969 at 00:00:00 UTC. TimeTools handles negative values correctly across all output formats.
What is the difference between ISO 8601 and RFC 3339?
RFC 3339 is a stricter profile of ISO 8601 used in internet protocols (HTTP, JWT, Atom feeds). The key difference is that RFC 3339 always requires a time zone offset and disallows some ambiguous ISO 8601 forms. Both are shown in the results so you can copy whichever your system expects.
What are .NET ticks?
.NET ticks are 100-nanosecond intervals since 1 January 0001 00:00:00 UTC — the .NET epoch, not the Unix epoch. They are used by DateTime.Ticks in C# and F#. The value is much larger than a Unix timestamp (~638 billion for a recent date).
Does my data leave the browser?
No. Every conversion runs locally in your browser using built-in JavaScript date APIs. Nothing you paste is sent to a server.
Related tools
Common intervals in seconds
Handy for cache TTLs, JWT expiry, and cron schedules.
| Interval | Seconds | Milliseconds |
|---|---|---|
| 1 minute | 60 | 60,000 |
| 1 hour | 3,600 | 3,600,000 |
| 1 day | 86,400 | 86,400,000 |
| 1 week | 604,800 | 604,800,000 |
| 30 days | 2,592,000 | 2,592,000,000 |
| 1 year (365.25 d) | 31,557,600 | 31,557,600,000 |
| 10 years | 315,576,000 | 315,576,000,000 |