Free Online Countdown Timer & Stopwatch

Timing tools that open instantly

Almost everything worth doing has a duration attached to it. Bread proves for an hour, a Pomodoro runs 25 minutes, an egg is soft at six minutes and hard at ten, rest between heavy sets is 90 seconds whether or not you feel ready. The tools on this site exist to keep track of those durations so you do not have to.

Everything here runs in your browser. There is no app to install, no account to create and no free trial that expires. Open a page, press start, and close the tab when you are finished. It works the same on a work laptop, a kitchen tablet and a phone at the gym.

The site is deliberately small. Rather than a long menu of half-finished utilities, there are two tools that are properly built and properly maintained: a countdown timer for when you know how long something should take, and a stopwatch for when you want to find out.

Countdown timer or stopwatch: which do you need?

The distinction is simple once you have heard it. A countdown starts from a number you choose and runs down to zero, then tells you. A stopwatch starts at zero and runs up until you stop it. Put another way: choose by which number you already know.

Getting started

Using the countdown timer

• Open the countdown timer and type the hours, minutes and seconds you need — anything from one second up to 99 hours. Type 90 into the minutes box and it rolls over into hours by itself.
• Optionally name it — "Bread proving", "Draft the report" — so you can tell several timers apart, and pick an alert sound from the speaker icon.
• Press start. The browser tab and the page address both rename themselves to match the timer, so you can bookmark it or pick it out of a crowded tab bar.

Using the stopwatch

• Open the stopwatch and press start. It begins at zero and counts up, with milliseconds shown underneath the main display.
• Pause when you are interrupted and resume when you are ready — the time already accumulated is kept, so a session split into three stretches still totals correctly.
• Reset when you are finished. It asks for confirmation first, so a stray tap will not throw away a long measurement.

What free actually means here

Free tools usually come with a catch, so it is worth being specific about this one. There is no account, no trial, no upgrade prompt and no feature reserved for paying users. The site is funded by advertising, and that is the whole arrangement.

Your timer and stopwatch history is saved in your own browser, on your own device. It is never uploaded, we cannot read it, and clearing your browser data removes it. Before any analytics or advertising cookie is set we ask for your consent, and declining leaves every feature working exactly as it did before — nothing is withheld from people who say no.

The full detail is in the privacy policy and the cookie policy.

Accuracy, and where the limits are

Both tools work from your device system clock rather than by counting animation frames. That distinction is the difference between a reading you can trust after an hour and one that has quietly drifted. Switch tabs, open another app or lock your phone, and the time is recalculated correctly the moment you return.

Being straight about the limits is more useful than claiming perfection, so:

• Browsers stop redrawing hidden tabs to save battery. The digits can appear frozen while you are away and then jump to the correct value — the measurement itself is never affected, only the picture.
• Mobile browsers suspend background pages aggressively. If a countdown alert matters, keep the tab open and the screen on rather than relying on a sound arriving from a locked phone.
• Closing the tab ends a running session. Saved history survives; the countdown in progress does not.
• The precision here suits cooking, training, study and everyday work. Anything that has to stand up as an official result — a sanctioned race, a laboratory measurement — belongs on purpose-built hardware instead.

Frequently Asked Questions