Random Date / Time Picker
Random date or time in a range.
Built and maintained by Paul Clark, Redmoon Software · Last checked
The Random Date / Time Picker chooses a random date between two dates, or a random time inside a range you set. It's handy for scheduling, sampling, giveaways, and picking surprise dates, with options to limit results to weekdays or round times to neat intervals. Set your range, pick, and you're done.
Set. Enter your start and end date, or a time range, in the Options.
Options
Click Pick to see a result.
Recent results
- No history yet.
How it works
- Set. Enter your start and end date, or a time range, in the Options.
- Adjust. Optionally turn on weekdays only or set the time granularity.
- Pick. Click Pick to draw a random date or time.
- Re-roll. Click Pick again for another value in the same range.
About the Random Date / Time Picker
Range, granularity and count
Set a start and end and the tool draws a moment between them. Leaving the dates blank defaults to a thirty-day window starting now, which is why the tool works with no configuration at all.
The Granularity setting rounds results to a sensible interval — fifteen minutes by default — so you get 14:30 rather than 14:37:52. That is the difference between a time you could actually put in a calendar and a timestamp.
The weekdays filter can return fewer results than you asked for
Ticking Weekdays only discards any draw that lands on a Saturday or Sunday and tries again. The retry loop is bounded, so it does not hang — but that means if your range contains few or no weekdays, the tool returns fewer results than you requested rather than failing.
A range covering a single weekend with weekdays-only ticked will therefore come back short or empty, and it will do so quietly. If you get fewer results than you expected, widen the range before assuming something is broken.
What you get out
- The Mode option formats results as a date, a time, or both, using your device's locale.
- Useful for scheduling spot checks, drawing an audit sample by time, or picking a review date nobody chose.
- Also useful for testing — a batch of random timestamps in a range is tedious to produce by hand.
- Times are in your local timezone, with no timezone conversion offered.
Granularity is about usability, not precision
Rounding to fifteen minutes is not a limitation of the draw — it is what makes the output usable. A random moment between two dates is precise to the millisecond, and nobody has ever wanted to schedule a review for 14:37:52.
Set it to sixty for whole hours, or to one when you genuinely want minute-level precision — generating test data, for instance, where the odd-looking timestamps are the point. Note that coarse granularity across a short range reduces the number of distinct results available, so drawing several from a one-day range at hourly granularity can produce repeats.
Frequently asked questions
Why "weekdays only"?
Schedulers and giveaways often need a business-day date, so this option skips weekends when it draws a date.
What does granularity do?
It rounds time results to the nearest N minutes, so you get tidy round times instead of odd values.
Is the result genuinely random?
Yes. Dates and times are drawn with the Web Crypto API, so every value in your range has an equal, unbiased chance.
Is anything I enter sent online?
No. The picker runs entirely in your browser, so your range settings stay on your device and it works offline.
Related randomizers
Further reading
- Why the standard 52-week savings challenge secretly punishes December
The classic ascending 52-week chart backs its biggest, hardest deposits into the final weeks of the year — right when holiday spending peaks. Shuffling the same amounts into a random order keeps the total and the deposit count identical while spreading the hard weeks evenly across the year.
- Scheduling a surprise check-in with a random time, not a random guess
A fire drill, a mystery-shopper visit, or a giveaway announcement only works if the timing can't be predicted or gamed. Here's how a random date/time picker draws a genuinely uniform moment inside your window, and the granularity detail that trips people up.
- Pick a random date or time inside a range, without skewing the odds
Choosing a random date between two days, or a random time inside business hours, is fiddlier than it looks once you add weekdays-only or round to the nearest quarter hour. Here's how a date/time picker keeps the spread genuinely uniform.