Minutes Between Two Dates

Formula

How this is calculated

Enter two points in time in the first and second date-time fields. Each value is parsed as a calendar date with an optional time of day; if you omit the time, midnight (00:00) is assumed. The ISO-style format YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM is the most reliable, but most human-readable formats your browser understands also work.

Both dates are converted to milliseconds since the Unix epoch (1970-01-01). The calculator takes the absolute difference of these two timestamps, so the order of the inputs does not matter — the result is always non-negative. Dividing that millisecond gap by 60000 gives minutes (60000 ms = 60 s = 1 minute), which is rounded down to whole minutes. Seconds use 1000 ms per second, hours use 3600000 ms per hour, and days use 86400000 ms per day; these last two are reported as exact decimals.

The arithmetic is based on absolute elapsed time. Because timestamps are absolute instants, this correctly accounts for crossing midnight, month ends, and leap years. Note that browser date parsing applies the local time zone, so daylight-saving transitions can shift a wall-clock difference by an hour; for time-zone-independent results, supply both values in the same explicit offset (for example, append Z for UTC).