Unix Timestamp Converter

What is a Unix Timestamp?

A Unix timestamp — also called epoch time — is the number of seconds that have elapsed since midnight Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on January 1, 1970. This starting point is known as the Unix epoch. Every moment after that is represented by a single integer, making timestamps a compact and unambiguous way to represent dates and times in software.

For example, the timestamp 1704067200 corresponds to January 1, 2024 at 00:00:00 UTC. Timestamps are timezone-agnostic by nature, which means the same integer represents the same instant everywhere on Earth.

The concept originated in early versions of Unix in the 1970s and has since become a near-universal convention. Operating systems, databases, APIs, and programming languages all rely on epoch seconds as a standard interchange format for date and time values. Because a timestamp is just a number, it avoids the ambiguity of month names, date ordering, and daylight-saving transitions that plague human-readable formats.

While the standard resolution is one second, some systems provide sub-second precision using fractional seconds or milliseconds. Regardless of resolution, the underlying principle remains the same: count upward from the epoch and store a single numeric value.

How to Use the Epoch Converter

This free tool lets you convert between Unix timestamps and human-readable dates in either direction.

1. Enter a Unix timestamp (in seconds) in the first field and click Convert to Date to see the corresponding date and time.
2. Pick a date and time using the second field and click Convert to Timestamp to get the epoch value.
3. Click Get Current Timestamp to instantly load today's timestamp into the converter.

Common Uses of Unix Timestamps

Unix timestamps appear across virtually every layer of modern software. Here are the most frequent use cases:

Databases

Relational databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQLite store timestamps as integer or datetime columns. Using epoch seconds simplifies range queries, indexing, and time-zone conversions because the database only needs to compare numbers rather than parse strings.

APIs and Web Services

REST and GraphQL APIs commonly represent creation dates, expiration windows, and rate-limit resets as Unix timestamps. JSON does not have a native date type, so a numeric epoch value is the most portable solution.

Log Files and Monitoring

Server logs, application logs, and metrics pipelines record events with epoch timestamps. This makes it trivial to calculate the exact elapsed time between two entries, sort entries chronologically, and aggregate data across distributed systems.

File Systems

Operating systems track file creation, modification, and access times as epoch values. On Linux, the stat command reveals these timestamps, and tools like find let you filter files by modification time using epoch-based arithmetic.

Version Control

Git stores commit timestamps internally as epoch values. Every commit object records the author and committer dates in this format, enabling precise chronological ordering across repositories regardless of the developer's local time zone.

Unix Timestamp Examples

The Year 2038 Problem

Many legacy systems store Unix timestamps in a 32-bit signed integer. The maximum positive value for that data type is 2,147,483,647, which corresponds to January 19, 2038 at 03:14:07 UTC. One second later the value overflows, wrapping around to a negative number that interprets as a date in December 1901.

This is sometimes called the Y2K38 bug or the Epochalypse. It affects any software that uses 32-bit time_t on platforms such as older Linux kernels, embedded firmware, and databases that have not migrated to 64-bit column types. Modern 64-bit systems can represent timestamps far into the future — well beyond billions of years — so the issue is primarily a compatibility concern.

Organizations are advised to audit their code bases, upgrade compilers and runtime libraries, and convert any stored 32-bit timestamps to 64-bit equivalents before the deadline.

Unix Timestamps vs Other Formats

Different projects favor different date representations. Here is how Unix time compares to three common alternatives:

ISO 8601

ISO 8601 strings like 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z are human-readable and widely supported. They are the preferred format for APIs, configuration files, and logs that people need to read directly. However, they consume more storage and require parsing before any arithmetic.

RFC 2822

RFC 2822 dates such as Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000 are common in email headers and HTTP. Like ISO 8601, they are self-describing but verbose and harder to sort numerically.

Julian Date

The Julian Date system counts continuous days from noon on January 1, 4713 BC. It is primarily used in astronomy. While it offers high precision for celestial calculations, it is impractical for everyday software because the numbers are extremely large and have no direct relationship to modern calendar systems.

How to Get the Current Timestamp

Use these quick snippets to fetch the current epoch time in your environment of choice.

JavaScript

// Seconds
const timestamp = Math.floor(Date.now() / 1000);

// Milliseconds
const ms = Date.now();

Python

import time

# Seconds
timestamp = int(time.time())

# Milliseconds
ms = int(time.time() * 1000)

Command Line

# macOS / Linux (GNU date)
date +%s

# PowerShell (Windows)
[math]::Floor((Get-Date -UFormat %s))

Frequently Asked Questions