Current Unix Timestamp
The live Unix timestamp right now, in seconds and milliseconds, ready to copy.
Current Unix Timestamp tool
| UTC | — | |
|---|---|---|
| Local time | — | |
| ISO 8601 | — | |
| RFC 2822 | — | |
| Microseconds | — | |
| ISO week / day of year | — |
Your clock reads —. The value comes from this device, so it is only as accurate as your system clock.
What this tool does
This page shows the current Unix epoch time and keeps it moving, in seconds and in milliseconds, with the same instant repeated below in the formats you are likely to need next. Press Pause when you want to copy a value that will not change between reading it and pasting it — the clock freezes, both copy buttons keep working, and Resume picks the live value back up.
The number is produced by Date.now() in your own browser. Nothing is fetched
from a time server, which means the reading is exactly as correct as your operating
system's clock and no more.
Common uses
-
Dropping a current timestamp into a seed file, a test fixture or a
curlcommand without leaving the browser. - Sanity-checking a value you just saw in a log: if it is wildly far from the number on this page, you are probably looking at the wrong unit.
- Setting a cache-busting query parameter or a one-off nonce by hand.
-
Confirming a machine's clock drift — compare this against a server's
Dateresponse header.
A short example
The same moment, in the four representations this page shows:
seconds 1758724205
milliseconds 1758724205431
ISO 8601 2025-09-24T14:30:05.431Z
RFC 2822 Wed, 24 Sep 2025 14:30:05 +0000
Note that the seconds value is the millisecond value with the last three digits removed —
truncated, never rounded. Math.floor(Date.now() / 1000) is the correct
conversion; rounding would put you up to half a second in the future.
Why your clock can be wrong
Consumer machines drift by a few seconds a day and correct themselves through NTP, usually
against time.windows.com, time.apple.com or a pool server. A
virtual machine that has been suspended, a container on a host with no NTP client, or a
device with a dead CMOS battery can be out by minutes or years. If a signature keeps
failing validation or a JWT is rejected as "not yet valid", clock skew is worth ruling out
before anything else — most token validators allow only 30 to 60 seconds of leeway.
Worth knowing
Date.now() is a wall-clock reading, so it can jump backwards when NTP corrects
the machine. For measuring how long something took, use
performance.now() instead — it is monotonic and unaffected by clock
adjustments. Browsers also deliberately coarsen timer resolution as a side-channel defence:
since Spectre, Date.now() has typically been rounded to the nearest
millisecond or worse, and the microsecond row above is that millisecond value multiplied
out, not genuine microsecond precision.
Frequently asked questions
Does a Unix timestamp depend on my timezone?
No. The count is the same integer in Auckland as in Los Angeles; only the rendering of it changes. So when two systems differ by exactly 3,600 or 19,800, that is not a timezone living inside the number — it is one side converting a wall-clock reading as though it were already UTC. MySQL is a frequent culprit: TIMESTAMP columns are converted using the session time_zone, DATETIME columns are not.
Does Unix time count leap seconds?
It does not. POSIX defines every day as exactly 86,400 seconds, so the 27 leap seconds inserted since 1972 are simply absent and the count now trails elapsed atomic time by that much. Rather than repeat a second and risk a clock going backwards, Google and AWS spread it across a 24-hour smear. The General Conference on Weights and Measures voted in 2022 to stop adding them by 2035.
How do I get the current timestamp in code?
In whole seconds: date +%s in a shell, time.time() in Python, time() in PHP, EXTRACT(EPOCH FROM now()) in PostgreSQL, UNIX_TIMESTAMP() in MySQL, time.Now().Unix() in Go. JavaScript and Java are the outliers that hand back milliseconds — Date.now() and System.currentTimeMillis() — and that mismatch is where most unit confusion between a front end and its database begins.