Unix Timestamp Converter

A Unix timestamp, also called epoch time, is the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1 1970 00:00:00 UTC, not counting leap seconds. It is a single number representing a moment in time independent of timezone, which is why it is the standard way computers store and exchange dates internally.

The Year 2038 problem occurs because many older systems store Unix time as a signed 32-bit integer, which can only count up to 2,147,483,647 seconds past the epoch. At 03:14:07 UTC on January 19 2038, that counter overflows and wraps to a negative number, which can roll dates back to 1901 on systems still using 32-bit time values.

A current Unix timestamp in seconds is 10 digits long. In milliseconds it is 13 digits, in microseconds it is 16 digits, and in nanoseconds it is 19 digits. Counting the digits is a quick way to guess which unit a timestamp is in before converting it.

A Unix timestamp itself has no timezone. It is always a count of seconds from UTC midnight on January 1 1970. Timezone only enters the picture when you convert that number into a human-readable date, at which point you choose whether to render it in UTC, your local timezone, or any other IANA timezone.

Many logging libraries and runtimes, including Node.js Date.now(), Python's time.time(), and Java's System.currentTimeMillis(), record timestamps as raw epoch milliseconds rather than formatted dates. This is timezone safe, sorts correctly as plain numbers, and avoids parsing ambiguity, but it means humans reading raw logs need a converter to make sense of the value. Paste any of those raw values into the converter above to see the human date instantly.