Unix Timestamp Converter
Translate epoch seconds or milliseconds into civil dates, or the reverse, when reading logs and JWT exp fields.
Confirm unit length—ten digits usually means seconds; thirteen often means milliseconds.
Current Unix time
00How to use
- Timestamp → Date: Enter a Unix timestamp (e.g. 1705312800 for seconds or 1705312800000 for milliseconds). The human-readable date and time appear below in UTC and your local format.
- Date → Timestamp: Switch to "Date → Timestamp", enter a date (e.g. 2024-01-15T12:00:00Z or "Jan 15, 2024 12:00"). The tool shows the epoch time in seconds or milliseconds.
- Use Share URL to copy a link with
?ts=so others can open the same timestamp. - Use Copy on the current time or any result to copy the value to the clipboard.
1Epoch time keeps systems simple
Unix time counts seconds (or milliseconds) since 1970-01-01 UTC, which lets databases sort and compare instants without time zone columns for every intermediate step.
Humans prefer local civil dates; converters bridge the gap when you read server logs or API fields named created_at.
- Confirm whether a value is in seconds or milliseconds—a ten-digit number is often seconds; thirteen digits suggests milliseconds.
- Leap seconds and historical calendar quirks mostly disappear at the epoch layer, but presentation still needs a time zone for local clocks.
2Debugging real incidents
When a token expires “too early,” compare exp in both seconds and human time to detect mixed units between services.
Batch jobs that bucket by day must agree on whether “midnight” means UTC boundary or business-local midnight—epoch math makes that explicit.
3Storing future dates
If you store only an epoch integer, you preserve an instant; if you store a calendar date without time zone, you preserve a civil date—do not confuse the two models.
For birthdays and anniversaries, many applications store month/day without year arithmetic in UTC to avoid shifting across the date line.
4Logs and metrics
Metrics backends store timestamps in seconds or milliseconds. Mixing units between services causes charts to show events in the wrong century or cluster them at epoch zero.
5User-visible dates
Store instants in UTC; convert to local time only in the presentation layer. Birthday fields without time zone are a different model—do not store them as Unix timestamps.
6Quick checklist for epoch times
Confirm seconds vs milliseconds before comparing to JWT exp or database fields. Display results in the time zone your incident runbook uses.
- Store instants in UTC at the persistence layer when possible.
- Document whether APIs return string or numeric epochs.
Examples
Seconds since epoch
Typical JWT exp and Unix log format.
1700000000 → 2023-11-14 (UTC, approximate)Milliseconds
JavaScript Date.now() returns 13-digit values.
1700000000000