About Timestamp Converter
A Unix timestamp counts the time since 1 January 1970 UTC, which makes it compact, unambiguous about time zones, and completely unreadable. Converting one is something developers do several times a day while reading logs and API responses.
The recurring trap is unit ambiguity. A bare number is seconds in most Unix tooling, milliseconds in JavaScript, and occasionally microseconds or nanoseconds in tracing systems. Guessing wrong puts you in 1970 or somewhere around the year 55000, so the unit is detected from magnitude and always shown — and you can override it.
Alongside the conversion you get the details that usually prompt the next question: the day of the week, the ISO week number, the day of the year, whether it is a leap year, and how long ago it was in plain language.
How to convert a timestamp
Paste a timestamp or a date
The tool works out which you gave it and converts in the right direction.
Check the detected unit
Seconds, milliseconds, microseconds or nanoseconds — override it if the guess is wrong.
Read the result
You get ISO 8601, UTC, your local time zone and a relative description.
Copy what you need
Every representation can be copied individually.
Which unit is it?
- 10 digits — seconds. The Unix default, used by most command-line tools and databases.
- 13 digits — milliseconds. What JavaScript's Date.now() returns.
- 16 digits — microseconds. Common in tracing and some Python code.
- 19 digits — nanoseconds. Go's time.UnixNano and several observability systems.
The year 2038 problem
Systems that store a Unix timestamp in a signed 32-bit integer overflow on 19 January 2038, wrapping around to 1901. It is the same class of bug as Y2K and it is still present in older embedded systems and some legacy databases.
Anything using a 64-bit integer is unaffected for practical purposes — that overflows about 292 billion years from now.