Time Ago Formatter

It chooses the largest whole unit that fits: minutes, hours, days, weeks, months (about 30 days) and years (about 365 days). Seconds are not shown on their own; anything under a minute collapses to 'just now'.

Anything less than a minute away in either direction reads as 'just now'. So a moment 30 seconds ago and one 30 seconds from now both display 'just now' rather than a seconds count.

Yes. A past time reads as 'N units ago' and a future time reads as 'in N units'. The presets include both, for example 'Yesterday' looks back while 'In 2 days' looks forward.

They use approximate fixed lengths of 30 and 365 days. This keeps phrases short and predictable, but it means a value near a boundary can round in a way a strict calendar would not. For example about 45 days shows as '1 month ago' even though calendar months vary in length.

The comparison is frozen to the 'now' shown on the 'Compared against' line, so the phrase stays stable while you read it. Click 'Refresh now' to snap the reference to the current instant, which is useful if the tab has been open for a while.

It rounds down to a whole unit. A gap of 90 minutes is '1 hour ago', not '2 hours ago', because only one full hour has passed. The same floor rule applies to every unit.

Yes. The tool writes '1 day ago' with no s and '2 days ago' with an s, matching the count for every unit from minutes to years.

Your local time zone. The date picker reads and shows wall-clock time from your device, and the reference 'now' is your device clock, so the phrase reflects the difference as you would experience it locally.

The interactive tool runs entirely in your browser and never uploads your dates. There is also a JSON API that takes a target timestamp in epoch milliseconds plus an optional 'now', because the engine never reads the clock itself.