Unix Timestamp Converter
Convert between Unix epoch and human-readable dates. Auto-detects seconds vs milliseconds, accepts ISO 8601 dates, and shows the result in your local timezone and UTC simultaneously.
About Unix Time
Unix time (also called epoch time or POSIX time) is the number of seconds that have elapsed since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. It is the de facto standard for storing and exchanging timestamps in computer systems because it is timezone-independent, monotonic (ignoring NTP corrections), and trivial to do arithmetic on.
Common Units & Formats
- Seconds (10 digits today):
1700000000— used by Unix system calls, syslog, PostgreSQLextract(epoch) - Milliseconds (13 digits):
1700000000000— used by JavaScriptDate.now(), JavaSystem.currentTimeMillis() - Microseconds (16 digits): used by databases, Python
time.time_ns() / 1000 - Nanoseconds (19 digits): Go
time.Now().UnixNano(), Linuxclock_gettime - ISO 8601:
2024-01-15T12:30:00Z— the recommended human-readable format for APIs - RFC 2822:
Mon, 15 Jan 2024 12:30:00 +0000— used in email headers and HTTPDate:
Year 2038 (Y2K38)
Signed 32-bit Unix timestamps overflow on 19 January 2038 at 03:14:07 UTC. Systems still using time_t as a 32-bit integer — embedded devices, old filesystems, some MySQL columns — will wrap to negative numbers and break. Most modern systems have moved to 64-bit time, which is good for the next ~292 billion years.
Frequently Asked Questions
int32 for time will wrap to negative numbers, breaking date logic. Modern systems use 64-bit integers (good for ~292 billion years), so this is mostly a concern for legacy embedded systems and old file formats.