Date to Unix Timestamp Converter
To convert a human date to a Unix timestamp, parse the string with new Date() and divide .getTime() by 1000. This tool builds the epoch in your browser, lets you pick the source IANA timezone, and emits seconds, milliseconds, microseconds and nanoseconds simultaneously.
Quick Conversion
Formula: seconds = ms ÷ 1000
Famous dates
Same wall-clock, different zones
The current input 2024-05-30T01:00 resolves to these epoch seconds depending on the IANA zone:
| Zone | Epoch (sec) | UTC equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| UTC | 1717030800 | 2024-05-30T01:00:00.000Z |
| Eastern (EDT/EST) | 1717045200 | 2024-05-30T05:00:00.000Z |
| Pacific (PDT/PST) | 1717056000 | 2024-05-30T08:00:00.000Z |
| London (BST/GMT) | 1717027200 | 2024-05-30T00:00:00.000Z |
| Berlin (CEST/CET) | 1717023600 | 2024-05-29T23:00:00.000Z |
| India (IST) | 1717011000 | 2024-05-29T19:30:00.000Z |
| Tokyo (JST) | 1716998400 | 2024-05-29T16:00:00.000Z |
| Sydney (AEDT/AEST) | 1716994800 | 2024-05-29T15:00:00.000Z |
Need the reverse? Timestamp → date converter.
Formula
epoch_seconds = Math.floor(new Date(iso + 'Z').getTime() / 1000)Worked: new Date('2024-05-30T01:00:00Z').getTime() = 1,717,030,800,000 ms → 1,717,030,800 sec.
How to convert a date to a Unix timestamp
- 1Pick the date and time in the datetime-local picker (browser-native, keyboard-friendly).
- 2Choose the source IANA timezone — defaults to UTC; use 'America/New_York', 'Asia/Kolkata', etc. when the input is a local wall-clock.
- 3Pick the output unit pill: seconds (classic Unix), ms (JavaScript), µs (Snowflake EVENT_TS), or ns (Prometheus, OpenTelemetry).
- 4Copy the bold epoch value with the clipboard button — or scan the full forms card for ISO 8601 and RFC 2822 simultaneously.
- 5Save the snapshot to your in-browser history; click it later to repopulate the form (no server, no cookie).
From sundial to ISO 8601: a brief history of representing dates as numbers
In 2026 a DevOps engineer triggering a one-off backfill needs to convert 2024-12-31 23:59 in Sydney time into a Unix epoch to pass to a CronJob spec — without leaving the browser. The conversion is one line of code, but the dropdown choice of IANA zone matters as much as the date itself. This tool is built to make that choice explicit.
The Unix epoch — 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z — was chosen by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie in 1969, anchored to the first Bell Labs minicomputer running UNIX. The original 1971 manual stored time in sixtieths of a second, then was replaced by one-second resolution before AT&T released UNIX V6. POSIX.1-2017 formalised the contract: 86,400 seconds per UTC day, leap seconds smeared.
In 1988 the International Organization for Standardization published ISO 8601, defining YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss as the global representation. The 2019 revision tightened week numbering and ordinal dates. ISO 8601-2:2019 added negative years and large-scale calendars — the format every modern API speaks. See our ISO 8601 converter for finer-grained format rewriting.
The internet got its own profile of ISO 8601 in 2002 when Chris Newman (Sun) and Graham Klyne (Nine by Nine) published RFC 3339 — a stricter subset that fixed ISO's ambiguities (no week dates, T-separator mandatory, offset-or-Z required). RFC 3339 is what every modern JSON API should emit.
The IANA tz database (originally Olson, started 1986) catalogues every timezone the world has ever adopted, including DST transitions, Standard time changes, and historical curiosities like Samoa skipping December 30, 2011. JavaScript's Intl.DateTimeFormat, Java's ZoneId, and Python's zoneinfo all delegate to it.
DST is the gotcha. On March 13, 2022 at 02:00 EST, the clock jumped to 03:00 EDT — there is no 02:30 EST that day, and any wall-clock-to-epoch tool must pick a side. This converter follows ECMAScript's rule (prefer the later instant) and is consistent across browsers.
Bottom line: store UTC epochs, render local. The whole point of a "date-to-timestamp" tool is to make the one-time conversion at write time explicit so the rest of your stack can stay timezone-agnostic.
Trusted by backend engineers, DBAs and scheduling specialists
“Picking a date, getting the Unix int, and copying with one click is exactly what I need 20 times a day. The DST-aware preview saved a launch.”
“Beats my old bash one-liner. I love that the timezone grid spells out IST and JST so I can quickly seed cross-region test data.”
“Our table uses epoch_ms in bigint. This is the only converter that hands me ms, µs and ns simultaneously.”
“I prep cron and at-job timestamps in a copy-pasted batch. Date → epoch with timezone aware preview is gold.”
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