How to use
- Enter a Unix timestamp. The field is prefilled with the current time.
- The UTC and local equivalents update as you type.
- Click Now to reset to the current timestamp.
About Unix timestamps
A Unix timestamp counts the seconds elapsed since 1 January 1970 at 00:00:00 UTC, a moment known as the epoch. Because it is a single integer with no timezone attached, it is unambiguous — which is exactly why it became the default way to move times between systems.
The seconds-versus-milliseconds split causes more bugs than anything else here. Unix
tooling and most databases use seconds; JavaScript’s Date.now() and the JVM use
milliseconds. Mixing them silently yields dates roughly a thousand times too far from
now, which is usually obvious, but a value off by a factor of 1000 in the other direction
lands in 1970 and is easy to misread as “no value set”.
Timestamps carry no timezone. The local time shown above is your browser’s interpretation; the same timestamp renders differently for a user in another region. Store and transmit timestamps in UTC, and convert only at the point of display.