Epoch to human date and back. Seconds or milliseconds, detected automatically.
Unix time counts the seconds since 1 January 1970 UTC, a compact and timezone-free way to store a moment. Paste a 10-digit (seconds) or 13-digit (milliseconds) value to read it as a date in your local time and UTC, or pick a date to get its timestamp. Everything runs in your browser.
A Unix timestamp is the number of seconds that have elapsed since midnight UTC on 1 January 1970, a moment known as the "epoch". It is how computers store and exchange time internally, because a single number is unambiguous, easy to compare and free of timezone or formatting confusion. The tool above converts a timestamp to a human-readable date and back, which you need constantly when working with logs, databases and APIs.
Why systems love it. Storing time as one integer makes sorting, differences and comparisons trivial: later times are simply bigger numbers, and the gap between two events is a subtraction. Timezones and display formats are applied only when a human needs to read it, keeping the stored value clean and universal.
The 2038 problem. Older systems store the timestamp in a signed 32-bit integer, which overflows on 19 January 2038, after which it can wrap to a negative number and misread the date, a smaller echo of the Year 2000 bug. Modern systems use 64-bit integers, which push the limit hundreds of billions of years out, so it is a concern mainly for legacy hardware and embedded devices.
A Unix timestamp (also called epoch time) is the number of seconds that have passed since 1 January 1970 at 00:00 UTC. It is a simple, timezone-free way for computers to store a moment in time.
Unix timestamps are usually in seconds (10 digits). JavaScript and some systems use milliseconds (13 digits). This tool detects which you pasted automatically and converts correctly.
The current epoch time is shown live at the top of the page and updates every second. Click it to copy.