Countdown Timer

Set any countdown

Type a number of hours, minutes or seconds into the boxes and press start. You can fill in one box or all three, so 90 seconds and one minute thirty both work, and anything up to a twenty-four hour countdown is fair game.

If you want one of the common lengths, the preset row below the boxes starts a countdown in a single tap: one, three, five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, forty-five and sixty minutes. Pressing a preset replaces whatever was running, so you can switch from a ten minute block to a twenty-five minute one without clearing anything first.

The reset button puts the countdown back to the length you set rather than to zero, which is what you want when you are running the same interval over and over.

Popular timers

Every length below has its own page that opens ready to run, so you can bookmark the one you use most or send it to someone else.

Will the alarm ring if I'm on another tab?

Yes, and this is the part most online timers get wrong. Browsers deliberately slow down tabs you are not looking at, so a timer that counts down by subtracting a step every tick falls behind the moment you switch away. Come back after twenty minutes and it has only counted twelve.

This countdown stores the clock time it is due to finish at, then compares that against the current time. The tab can be throttled as hard as the browser likes and the finish time does not move. When it arrives the alarm starts and keeps looping until you stop it, rather than playing once into an empty room while you are in another window.

Leave the tab visible in a second window if you want to watch the digits. The page title counts down too, so the tab strip shows the remaining time without you switching back.

Countdown timer or stopwatch?

A countdown starts from a length you choose and runs to zero, where it rings. Reach for it when the duration is already decided and you would rather not watch the clock: a twenty minute nap, bread proving, a timed exam question, a five minute break between work blocks.

A stopwatch does the opposite. It starts at zero and counts up until you stop it, which is what you need when the duration is the thing you are measuring rather than the thing you are enforcing.

If you came here wanting to time how long something takes, the stopwatch counts up and records lap times.

Frequently asked questions

Related tools

• online stopwatch for counting up with lap times.
• pomodoro timer for focus sessions with breaks built in.