FileGizmo Developer tools
Convert a Unix timestamp
Convert a Unix timestamp to a readable date, or a date back to epoch seconds, with the scale it was read as stated.
Simple by design
Unix timestamp converter in three steps
A Unix timestamp counts the time since the first moment of 1970 in UTC. It is a single number with no time zone attached, which is exactly why it is used for storing and transmitting time, and exactly why it is unreadable without converting it.
The one real difficulty is scale. The same instant can be written in seconds, milliseconds, or microseconds, and nothing inside the number says which was intended. A converter has to guess, and the only signal available is how many digits there are: ten for seconds until well into the next century, thirteen for milliseconds, sixteen for microseconds. Guess wrong and the answer is off by a factor of a thousand, which is why so many timestamps come back reading as a date in January 1970. Rather than apply that guess silently, this tool states which reading it used, so a wrong one is obvious rather than believed.
Every form is shown at once: the ISO 8601 string, the UTC form, the same moment in your own time zone with the zone named, and the value back in both seconds and milliseconds. That covers the two questions people actually arrive with, which are what time this number represents and what this date is as a number.
Dates before 1970 work too. They are simply negative, counting backwards from the epoch.
Conversion happens in your browser. Timestamps pulled from logs and database rows are ordinary debugging material, but the rows they came from often are not, and nothing here needs a server to do arithmetic on a number.
- 1
Paste a Unix timestamp or an ISO date
- 2
Check which scale it was read as
- 3
Copy the format you need
Good to know
Frequently asked questions
How does it know if my number is seconds or milliseconds?
By digit count, which is the only signal the number carries. Ten digits is seconds until the year 2286, thirteen is milliseconds, sixteen is microseconds. The reading is stated next to the result so you can catch a wrong guess.
Why did another converter give me a date in 1970?
Because it read epoch seconds as milliseconds. Dividing by a thousand puts almost any modern timestamp within days of 1 January 1970, which is the usual cause of that result.
Which time zone is shown?
Both. UTC is shown because that is what the number means, and your own zone is shown separately with its name, so a value that looks an hour off is explained rather than confusing.
Do timestamps before 1970 work?
Yes. They are negative numbers, counting backwards from the epoch, and they convert the same way.