🔒 Your timers and saved settings stay in your browser.
Timers, time zones and date tools that just work
Free, fast tools for counting down, keeping time and working out dates across time zones. No account, no sign-up — everything runs in your browser.
Timers
- Countdown Timer Count down to any date or event — save it, and share it with a link.
- Online Timer Presets, a sound at zero, and a panel that tells you when it finished if you were away.
- Online Stopwatch Start, stop and record lap times — with each lap’s own duration beside the running total.
- Pomodoro Timer Focus sessions with breaks, a session history and a daily streak.
Time zones
Date tools
Guides
Some ideas about time are bigger than any tool on this site and keep causing the same mistakes. These short guides explain the mechanisms behind them, no tool required. They are collected on the guides page.
- UTC and GMT are not the same thing One is a standard that never moves; the other is a zone that springs forward. The same zone reports GMT in January and GMT+01:00 in July.
- A time zone is not an offset An offset belongs to a place at an instant, not to a place. Storing the number instead of the zone name is how future dates go quietly wrong.
- The hour that does not exist, and the hour that happens twice A clock change deletes one local hour and repeats another. One of those errors is loud; the other is silent, which makes it the expensive one.
- Why some places are 45 minutes out Whole-hour offsets are a convention, not a rule. Rounding a half-hour zone produces an answer that looks exactly like a meeting time.
How these tools work out their answers
There is no server in the loop. When you convert a time or count down to a date, the arithmetic happens on the device you are reading this on, in the page you already have open. Nothing you type is sent anywhere to be calculated, and no result is fetched back. That is why the tools respond instantly, why they keep working if your connection drops mid-session, and why the privacy story further down this page is as short as it is.
It also constrains what the site is allowed to get wrong. A converter that asks a server for the answer can be quietly patched when a country changes its clocks. One that computes in your browser has to be right at the moment you press the button — so the eight tools here share a single tested core of date and time functions rather than each doing their own arithmetic, and that core is covered by a test suite that runs on three JavaScript engines before anything ships. The exact figures are on how we test.
Where the time zone rules come from
Time zone rules are not a fixed table. Governments move daylight saving dates, abolish them, reinstate them, and occasionally change a standard offset outright — several times in a typical year, often with only weeks of notice. Any site that ships its own copy of those rules starts going stale the day it is published, and the failure is silent: it keeps returning confident answers that are simply out of date.
So this site does not ship one. Time zone rules are read from the Intl APIs already built into your browser, which carry the IANA Time Zone Database as maintained by whoever wrote your browser or operating system. When your device updates, the tools here update with it. The trade-off is honest and worth stating: a device that has not been updated in years will hold older rules, and this site cannot correct that from the outside.
The one thing we do keep locally is the list of places — the cities you search for in the pickers — because that is a naming and coverage problem rather than a rules problem. Its sources, versions and the changes we made to them are itemised on where our data comes from.
Why this is harder than it looks
Most time bugs come from three assumptions that feel safe and are not. The first is that an
offset belongs to a place. It does not; it belongs to a place at an instant, which
is why every tool here works from a named zone such as Europe/Lisbon rather than
a fixed number of hours.
The second is that offsets are whole hours. India runs at +5:30, Nepal at +5:45, and parts of New Zealand's territory at +12:45. Rounding any of those to the nearest hour produces an answer that is wrong by a quarter of an hour and looks entirely plausible.
The third is that a day is 24 hours long. On the two days a year a region shifts its clocks, a local day is 23 or 25 hours, and a meeting grid built by adding twenty-four hours to yesterday drifts by one row at exactly the moment people most need it to be right. The planner steps through instants rather than clock readings for that reason, so those days come out correct by construction instead of by special case. There is more on what changed recently, and where, in recent time zone changes.
What these tools deliberately do not do
A browser timer is not a reliable alarm, and we will not describe it as one. Mobile operating systems throttle or suspend background tabs to save battery, so a countdown left running in a backgrounded tab may fire late or not at all. For anything that genuinely matters — a flight, a medication, an exam — use your device's own alarm. These tools are for the working stopwatch, the meeting you are planning now, the timer you can see.
There is also no business-day calculator here, and its absence is deliberate rather than pending. Counting working days needs a public holiday table for every country the site serves, and holiday tables need correcting every single year. A table nobody maintains does not break loudly — it keeps answering, confidently and wrongly, and a visitor has no way to tell. We would rather not offer the tool than offer a version that quietly decays. The same reasoning is why the working week is a setting you choose rather than a Saturday-and-Sunday assumption we make on your behalf: a great many countries do not rest on those two days.
How this site handles your data
Everything you enter — timers, saved cities, countdowns — is computed in your browser and stored only on your device. This site is supported by ads: when advertising is enabled, Google may set cookies and collect data such as your IP address, subject to your consent choices.
In practice that means there is no account to create, nothing to upload, and no profile accumulating in the background. Your saved cities and countdowns live in this browser's own storage, which also means clearing site data or moving to another device will erase them. The details are on our privacy notice.