Unix Timestamp 1672531200

What does the timestamp 1672531200 mean?

The Unix timestamp 1,672,531,200 pins down midnight UTC at the start of 2023: the instant the clock struck 00:00:00 UTC on Sunday, January 1, 2023. Year-boundary values like this one are everywhere in analytics and reporting code.

The opening instant of 2023 in UTC. Like other year boundaries, it is invaluable for partitioning logs, billing periods, and cohort analyses by calendar year.

Why 1672531200 matters

2023 began in UTC on a Sunday, which, like 2022 before it, means the calendar year and the ISO week-numbering year disagree at the boundary: January 1, 2023 belongs to ISO week 2022-W52, and 2023-W01 does not start until Monday, January 2. The timestamp is 19,358 days after the epoch, and the year that follows is a common one of 31,536,000 seconds, closing at 1704067200. 2023 was also the first year to begin after the General Conference on Weights and Measures voted, in November 2022, to stop inserting leap seconds into UTC by 2035, a decision that will eventually make the Unix clock and true elapsed time drift apart in a controlled way rather than through repeated one-second corrections. No leap second has been added since the end of 2016, so the Unix clock has run without a single repeated second for the whole of 2017 onwards. For partitioning purposes this value is the standard 2023 lower bound in log queries, billing periods and cohort analyses, and in hexadecimal it is 0x63B0CD00.

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 1,672,531,200 seconds is the same instant as 1,672,531,200,000 milliseconds — the form most programming languages expect, since JavaScript, Java, and many databases store time in milliseconds. Written out in full it is Sunday, January 1, 2023 at 00:00:00 UTC, which is a Sunday. In the two most common machine-readable formats it is 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z (ISO 8601) and Sun, 01 Jan 2023 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 1672531200 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(1672531200 * 1000).toUTCString(). Here are the equivalents in three common environments:

// JavaScript
const ts = 1672531200;
const date = new Date(ts * 1000);   // JS uses milliseconds
console.log(date.toUTCString());    // Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT
console.log(date.toISOString());    // 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z

# Python 3
from datetime import datetime, timezone
ts = 1672531200
print(datetime.fromtimestamp(ts, tz=timezone.utc))
# 2023-01-01 00:00:00+00:00

# Bash / GNU date
date -u -d @1672531200
# Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 UTC

# macOS / BSD date
date -u -r 1672531200

If you would rather not write code at all, the Epoch Converter is pre-loaded with 1672531200 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 1672531200 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 1672531200 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:

1600000000 — Round Timestamp 1.6 BillionSunday, September 13, 20201640995200 — Start of 2022Saturday, January 1, 20221700000000 — Round Timestamp 1.7 BillionTuesday, November 14, 20231735689600 — Start of 2025Wednesday, January 1, 2025