Timestamp Converter
Convert Unix timestamps to human-readable dates and back, across any time zone — with batch conversion, world clocks, time difference math, custom formats, and a timestamp generator, all local to your browser.
Loading tool…
What is a Unix timestamp?
A Unix timestamp is the number of seconds elapsed since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970, a moment known as the epoch. It is how computers store time almost everywhere: in databases, log files, API payloads, JWT expiry claims, and file metadata. One integer, no time zone, no ambiguity about date formats — which is exactly why it is used, and exactly why humans cannot read it.
Two details matter in practice. Some systems store seconds and others milliseconds, so a value with thirteen digits is a millisecond timestamp and ten digits is seconds; mixing them up puts you off by a factor of a thousand. And a timestamp is always UTC, so converting it for a human means applying a time zone — the same instant is a different wall-clock time in Amman, London, and New York.
Why we built this tool
You reach for this while reading logs, correlating events across services, checking when a token expires, or working out whether a record was written before or after an incident.
The values themselves are rarely secret, but they arrive glued to log lines and payloads that very much are. A converter that keeps everything local means you can paste a whole line without thinking about what else is in it. Ours runs entirely in the browser using the JavaScript date API, so no request is made and nothing is stored. It also works offline, which matters when you are deep in an incident and would rather not be relying on someone else's uptime.
Tips and common mistakes
- Ten digits mean seconds, thirteen mean milliseconds — count before you convert.
- Timestamps are always UTC; the local time you see depends on your device's time zone setting.
- Daylight saving transitions make some local times ambiguous or non-existent, which is exactly why systems store UTC.
- Negative timestamps are valid and represent dates before 1970.
Open Timestamp Converter with a link
Timestamp Converter can be handed its input by the link that opens it, so the page arrives with the work already done. This is meant for assistants and scripts: if a chatbot, an editor extension, or a command-line agent already holds your content, it can build a link instead of asking you to copy and paste into a box.
The payload rides in the fragment — the part of a URL after the #. Browsers never send the fragment to a server, so anything handed over this way stays on your device exactly as a dropped file would. A link that uses the query string instead is rewritten into the fragment by the page before any analytics or ad script can read the address.
Prefix any field with gz — #gztext= — to pass it as gzip-compressed base64url, which fits roughly five to ten times more into the same link. Links stay reliable up to about 8,000 characters; past that, chat apps and address bars start truncating them, and the page says so rather than loading half a document.
One exception to the privacy rule: ?url= tells the page to download the input from an address. That request goes from your browser straight to that server — not through ours — but it does leave your device, and it only works if the server allows cross-origin requests.
#text=— the text to work on
Example: https://mygadgets.ink/tools/timestamp-converter/#text=...
Quick start: using Timestamp Converter
- Paste a Unix timestamp to convert it into a readable date, or enter a date to get the timestamp.
- Check whether your value is in seconds or milliseconds — count the digits.
- Read the result in both UTC and your local time zone.
- Use the current-time option when you need a timestamp for right now.
- Copy whichever representation you need.
Reading token expiry? JWT Decoder shows the claim; this tool turns it into a date. For age arithmetic in human terms, see Age Calculator.