How to get the current time in JavaScript

In this article, I am going to show you how to get and display the current time in any format in JavaScript.

Step #1: Getting the date at the current time

const now = new Date();

Step #2: Displaying the current time

Let’s try some examples.

Example #1: The human-readable time portion

// 16:53:02 GMT+0700 (Indochina Time)
const text = now.toTimeString();

Example #2: The “HH:mm:ss” format (the local timezone)

const hours = now.getHours();
const minutes = now.getMinutes();
const seconds = now.getSeconds();
const padZero = value => value.toString().padStart(2, '0');

// 16:53:02
const text = [hours, minutes, seconds].map(padZero).join(':');

Example #3: The “HH:mm:ss” format (UTC+00:00)

const hours = now.getUTCHours();
const minutes = now.getUTCMinutes();
const seconds = now.getUTCSeconds();
const padZero = value => value.toString().padStart(2, '0');

// 09:53:02
const text = [hours, minutes, seconds].map(padZero).join(':');

Note: you only need to replace the get*() methods with the getUTC*() ones to get the corresponding UTC values.

Bonus tip: Date.prototype.toISOString() always returns a string with zero UTC offset (the letter Z at the end), so you can extract the time portion from the string result.

// 09:53:02
const text = now.toISOString().substring(11, 19);