Short timers (under 5 minutes)
Press start for a full-screen 5-minute timer that counts down 05:00 and rings a loud alarm when it reaches zero. You can pause and resume it, reset it, and the countdown keeps running accurately even if you switch tabs or your screen dims. No sign-up, nothing to install.
Ready · 5-minute timer
Five minutes is the single most-searched timer length, and for good reason: it is the universal short break. Long enough to do something restorative — stretch, make a coffee, step outside — but short enough that it will not derail what you were doing. It is the standard interval between Pomodoro work sessions and the length teachers and parents reach for when they need 'five more minutes'.
Not all five-minute breaks are equal. Research on attention restoration suggests that the breaks that genuinely recharge you involve a change of environment and a change of input: standing up, looking at something far away or out of a window, and moving your body. The breaks that do not help are the ones where you stay in the same chair and swap one screen for another — checking your phone for five minutes leaves your attention as depleted as before. The discipline a timer provides cuts both ways here. It protects the break from shrinking to nothing when you are busy, and just as importantly it ends the break before it quietly expands into fifteen minutes of scrolling. Set the five minutes, leave the desk, and come back when it chimes.
Most browser timers drift, because they count by accumulating small ticks, and browsers deliberately slow those ticks down in background tabs to save battery. This one is different: the moment you press start it records the exact wall-clock time the countdown should end, and every frame it simply measures how long is left until that fixed end time. If you switch tabs, lock your phone, or the tab is throttled, the remaining time is recomputed from the real clock the instant you come back, so a 5-minute timer is still a 5 minutes timer rather than however long the throttled ticks happened to add up to. On phones the page asks for a screen wake lock while the countdown is running, where the browser allows it, so the display does not sleep mid-count. The alarm is synthesised in the browser with the Web Audio API, which means there is no audio file to download and the chime is ready the moment you start.
Need a different length? These are the timers people most often reach for alongside a 5-minute timer:
Browse the full set of countdown timers, or switch tools: the Pomodoro timer loops work and break intervals automatically, the online stopwatch counts up with laps, the alarm clock rings at a specific time of day, and the countdown maker counts down to a future date you can share or embed.