Unix Timestamp 1577836800

What does the timestamp 1577836800 mean?

The Unix timestamp 1,577,836,800 pins down midnight UTC at the very start of the year 2020: the instant the clock struck 00:00:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 1, 2020. Year-boundary values like this one are everywhere in analytics and reporting code.

This timestamp marks the instant the 2020s decade began in UTC. Year-boundary timestamps are heavily used in analytics queries that bucket events by year.

Why 1577836800 matters

1577836800 is the first second of 2020 in UTC, which fell on a Wednesday. Because 2020 was a leap year of 366 days, or 31,622,400 seconds, the matching end boundary is 1609459200, the first second of 2021, and a query for "everything in 2020" is simply ts >= 1577836800 AND ts < 1609459200. The value is exactly 18,262 days after the epoch, with no remainder, as every UTC midnight is. The date carries some history of its own. The new year brought a small crop of "Y2020" bugs in software that stored years as two digits and treated 20 specially: New York City parking meters stopped accepting card payments on January 1, and several vendors issued advisories about date parsing that went wrong once the year could no longer be told apart from the century. Within weeks the COVID-19 pandemic made 2020 the most heavily analysed year in recent memory, so this boundary appears in an enormous number of dashboards and cohort queries. It is also the start of ISO week 2020-W01, since January 1 was a Wednesday, which keeps calendar and ISO years aligned for once.

The exact value, every way you need it

A Unix timestamp is a single integer: the count of seconds elapsed since the Unix epoch (midnight UTC on January 1, 1970), ignoring leap seconds. The value 1,577,836,800 seconds is the same instant as 1,577,836,800,000 milliseconds — the form most programming languages expect, since JavaScript, Java, and many databases store time in milliseconds. Written out in full it is Wednesday, January 1, 2020 at 00:00:00 UTC, which is a Wednesday. In the two most common machine-readable formats it is 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z (ISO 8601) and Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000 (RFC 2822). All of these describe one and the same moment in time; they differ only in notation.

How to convert 1577836800 in code

Turning this timestamp into a human-readable date takes a single expression in most languages. In JavaScript, remember to multiply by 1000 because Date works in milliseconds: new Date(1577836800 * 1000).toUTCString(). Here are the equivalents in three common environments:

// JavaScript
const ts = 1577836800;
const date = new Date(ts * 1000);   // JS uses milliseconds
console.log(date.toUTCString());    // Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT
console.log(date.toISOString());    // 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z

# Python 3
from datetime import datetime, timezone
ts = 1577836800
print(datetime.fromtimestamp(ts, tz=timezone.utc))
# 2020-01-01 00:00:00+00:00

# Bash / GNU date
date -u -d @1577836800
# Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 UTC

# macOS / BSD date
date -u -r 1577836800

If you would rather not write code at all, the Epoch Converter is pre-loaded with 1577836800 so you can see it converted instantly and tweak the value live.

How long ago (or how far away) is it?

The headline near the top of this page updates every time you load it, computing the gap between 1577836800 and your current clock in real time so it never goes stale. To measure the span between this timestamp and any other date precisely — in years, months, weeks, days, or business days — use the Date Duration Calculator. To watch a future moment tick down second by second, the Countdown Timer can target this exact instant.

Why timestamps matter

Storing time as a plain integer of seconds is wonderfully unambiguous: there is no time zone, no daylight saving, and no locale to misinterpret. Two servers anywhere on Earth agree on what 1577836800 means. That is why logs, databases, JWTs, file metadata, and APIs lean on Unix time so heavily. The trade-off is that the number is not human-friendly at a glance — which is exactly the gap a reference like this page fills.

Related timestamps

Other notable Unix timestamps worth a look:

1400000000 — Round Timestamp 1.4 BillionTuesday, May 13, 20141500000000 — Round Timestamp 1.5 BillionFriday, July 14, 20171600000000 — Round Timestamp 1.6 BillionSunday, September 13, 20201640995200 — Start of 2022Saturday, January 1, 2022