Online Countdown to Any Date

A countdown answers one question: how long until a fixed moment? That moment can be an exam, a flight, a product launch, a wedding, the end of a contract or simply New Year's Eve. Enter the date and, optionally, the time, and the page shows the remaining days, hours, minutes and seconds, refreshing every second. Because the target is a date on the calendar rather than a duration, the countdown keeps working across page reloads and days: it is recomputed from the clock each time, not remembered as a ticking value.

For events with a public significance, such as holidays or a race, people often keep the page open on a second monitor or a tablet in the office. For personal targets, the birthday countdown and retirement countdown add details specific to those occasions, and the countdown to date variant lets you name the event and shows months and weeks alongside days.

The countdown uses the clock and time zone of the device you are on. If you set a target of "1 January, 00:00", it means midnight where you are. Someone opening the same page in another country will get a different remaining time, which is usually what you want for a personal event and usually not what you want for a shared, global one. For a launch that happens at a specific instant worldwide, work out the time in your zone first with the time zone converter and enter that.

Daylight saving transitions are handled by the browser's own date arithmetic, so a countdown that crosses the spring-forward night will correctly show one hour less. Our time zones explainer covers why "midnight UTC" and "midnight in New York" are five or four hours apart depending on the month.

Three tools on this site count towards a moment, and the difference is what you tell them. The timer takes a duration ("25 minutes from now"). The alarm clock takes a time of day ("7:00 tomorrow morning") and rings once. The countdown takes a calendar date and shows the gap, which can be months. If you want the countdown to make a sound when it reaches zero, keep the tab open; the event-reached message and chime fire only while the page is loaded, exactly as with the timer.

• Study plans. Put the exam date on screen and divide the remaining days by the number of topics. A visible number is more motivating than a date in a diary. Pair it with the study timer for the sessions themselves.
• Project deadlines. Count down to the delivery date, not the meeting where you present it; the meeting date drifts, the delivery rarely does. The sprint timer does the same for two-week agile sprints.
• Classroom or event screens. Use your browser's full-screen mode to turn the countdown into a display for a projector.
• Working days only. The countdown shows calendar days. To exclude weekends, use the date calculator, which can count business days between two dates.