Countdown Timer — set it, watch it, fill the screen
A timer that counts down to a fixed end time rather than ticking one second at a time, so it stays accurate even if you switch tabs. Pick a preset or type any length up to 99 hours, press Start, and press F for digits big enough to read across a room.
- No signup, nothing uploaded or saved
- Works offline
Timer ready.
This timer is silent — it finishes with a change on screen and in the tab title, not a sound. Keep it somewhere you can see it.
Clicking a length starts it straight away — including over a timer that is already running, so there is no button to find first.
Type freely: 90 in the minutes box means ninety minutes, not an error. The ceiling is 99:59:59.
How it works
- 1
Pick a length
The presets cover the lengths people actually ask for, from one minute to an hour, and clicking one starts it straight away. For anything else, type into the hours, minutes and seconds boxes — 90 in the minutes box means ninety minutes, so you never have to convert it to 1 and 30 yourself.
- 2
Start, pause, add time
Space starts and pauses without reaching for the mouse. Pausing holds the exact remaining time and resuming carries on from there. The +1:00 and +5:00 buttons extend a timer that is already running, which is the normal case when something needs a little longer rather than starting over.
- 3
Fill the screen
Press F or click Fullscreen and the digits grow to fill the display, with everything else out of the way — readable from the back of a classroom or across a gym. While the screen is filled, the browser is asked to keep the display awake, so it will not dim halfway through. ESC brings the page back.
- 4
Watch it finish
At zero the display switches to a high-contrast finished state and stays there until you dismiss it, so a glance tells you whether it ended or is still going. The browser tab is renamed to the remaining time while it runs, which means a timer in a background tab is still readable from the tab strip.
What people set a countdown for
Classrooms and exams
A timer projected on the board answers the question every class asks without anyone having to ask it. Fullscreen is the mode that matters here — the digits scale to the display, so they stay legible from the back row on a projector that is not especially bright. Reading time, a five-minute warning before collection, a rotation between stations: set it, project it, and the room self-manages. Because the countdown is anchored to a fixed end time, clicking to another tab to open the next slide does not cost the class any seconds.
Workouts and intervals
Planks, rounds, rest between sets, a circuit station. The screen stays awake while the timer fills it, which is the difference between a phone propped against a water bottle being useful and being a black rectangle you have to poke every thirty seconds. Add time mid-set with +1:00 rather than restarting, and pause when someone needs to swap out.
Focus blocks and the pomodoro method
The 25-minute preset is one pomodoro; the 5-minute preset is the short break that follows it, and the 15-minute preset is the longer break after four of them. Nothing here enforces the cycle or counts your sessions, because that would need an account and a record of how you spend your day, and this site does not keep either. It is the clock, and you decide what the clock means.
Cooking and brewing
Three minutes for a soft-boiled egg, two for green tea before it turns bitter, five for black tea. The preset tooltips name these so you are not converting a rule of thumb into a number every time. One caution worth stating plainly: this timer does not make a sound, so it is the wrong tool for something in an oven in another room, and the right one for something in front of you.
Meetings, talks and presentations
A speaking slot, a demo, a two-minute question window, a stand-up where everyone gets ninety seconds. Put it on a second screen and it does the chairing for you, without anyone having to be the person who interrupts. Pause is the honest control here — a discussion worth having is worth stopping the clock for, and resuming picks up at the exact second you left.
Turn-taking and screen time at home
Board games with a slow thinker, a turn on the console, ten more minutes before bath time. A visible clock moves the argument from a person to a number on a wall, which is the whole trick. The finished state is deliberately hard to miss and stays on screen until it is dismissed, so nobody can claim it never went off.
Frequently asked questions
Does the timer make a sound when it finishes?
No. This timer is silent by design — it signals the end visually instead: the digits switch to a high-contrast finished state that stays on screen until you dismiss it, and the browser tab is renamed so a glance at the tab strip tells you. That makes it the right tool when the screen is in front of you or projected on a wall, and the wrong tool for something in an oven in another room while you are elsewhere in the house. If an alarm you can hear from another room is what you need, a kitchen timer or your phone’s built-in alarm is the honest answer, and we would rather say so here than have you find out afterwards.
Does it keep counting if I switch to another tab or minimise the window?
Yes, and this is the part most web timers get wrong. Browsers deliberately slow down JavaScript timers in tabs you are not looking at — down to roughly one tick per second, and sometimes freezing them entirely to save battery. A timer that subtracts a second per tick simply loses that time and finishes late by however long you were away. This one never counts ticks. When you press Start it works out the exact clock time the timer should end, and every redraw asks how far away that moment is now. Come back after ten minutes in another tab and the first frame you see is already correct, because nothing was ever being remembered. It also recalculates the instant the tab becomes visible again, rather than waiting up to a second for the next tick.
Will my screen switch off or dim while the timer runs?
Not while the timer is filling the screen. Entering fullscreen asks the browser for a screen wake lock, which is the same mechanism a video player uses to stop your phone dimming mid-film, and it is released the moment you exit. It is tied to fullscreen on purpose: keeping a display awake is the single biggest battery cost anything on this page can impose, so it happens only when you have explicitly asked for the timer to take over the screen — never silently in a background tab. Some browsers do not offer the feature at all, and some refuse it on battery power; when that happens the timer carries on normally and your usual screen timeout applies.
Is anything I type here saved or uploaded?
No. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is saved. The timer lives entirely in the page while it is open — close the tab or reload and it is gone, including the length you set. There is no account, no database and no record of what you timed. That does mean a running timer does not survive a reload, which is a real trade-off rather than an oversight: keeping it would mean writing to your browser’s storage, and for a tool this small we would rather be able to say plainly that nothing is kept at all.
What is the longest timer I can set?
99 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds. That is not a technical ceiling so much as the point where a browser tab stops being a sensible place to keep a countdown — anything measured in days should be a calendar entry, because a tab that has to stay open for a week will not. You can type freely into the boxes: 90 in the minutes field is understood as ninety minutes rather than being rejected or silently clipped to 30, since typing 90 is what most people do for an hour and a half.
Why does the display show 05:00 rather than 04:59 when I start a five-minute timer?
Because the remaining time is rounded up to the next whole second, which is what a clock does and what a stopwatch does not. Round down instead and a fresh five-minute timer reads 04:59 immediately, which looks like it has lost a second before it started, and the last second is spent showing 00:00 while the timer is still running. Rounding up means 00:01 is displayed for a full second and 00:00 appears exactly when the time is up. The display refreshes four times a second so the seconds change cleanly rather than stuttering, which is invisible when it is right and obvious when it is not.
Can I use it as a pomodoro timer?
Yes — the 25-minute preset is one pomodoro and the 5-minute preset is the break. What it will not do is run the cycle for you, count how many you have completed, or nag you when the break ends. Tracking a work pattern across a day means keeping a record of your day, and this site has nowhere to keep one and no intention of acquiring one. Two clicks per interval is the price of a tool that knows nothing about you.
Does it work offline?
Yes, once the page has loaded. All the arithmetic runs in your browser and nothing is fetched while the timer counts, so an aeroplane, a basement or a dead Wi-Fi router makes no difference to a timer that is already on screen. The page does load Google AdSense when you first open it, in common with every page on this site, so the initial load does need a connection.
Why do the keyboard shortcuts sometimes not work?
They deliberately stand aside for text fields. While the cursor is in the hours, minutes or seconds box, Space types a space and F types the letter F, because a shortcut that eats your keystrokes is worse than no shortcut. Space also only starts and pauses while the timer itself is on screen — further down the page it scrolls, as it should, since hijacking Space in a page of prose would break the thing you were doing. F for fullscreen and R for reset work anywhere outside a text field.