Stopwatch – Precise Online Timing With Laps and Splits
Whether you are timing a workout, a cooking step, a presentation rehearsal, or a study session, a reliable stopwatch needs to do one thing perfectly: measure elapsed time without drifting, freezing, or losing your progress. This free online stopwatch starts counting up from zero the moment you press Start, and lets you pause, resume, record laps, and compare your pace against a target — all without leaving the page.
How the Timing Stays Accurate
Instead of counting how many times a repeating timer has fired — an approach that drifts over long durations — this stopwatch measures real elapsed time using the browser's high-resolution clock and recalculates the display from actual timestamps on every update. That means the number you see is always timeNow − timeStarted + previouslyAccumulated, not an accumulation of imprecise ticks. It stays correct even if you switch to another browser tab, minimize the window, or your device momentarily sleeps.
Recording Laps and Splits
Press Lap while the stopwatch is running to capture a split without interrupting the overall timer — useful for tracking laps in a race, rounds in a workout, or stages of a task. Each row in the lap table shows two numbers: the split (time since the previous lap) and the cumulativetime (time since Start). Once you have recorded at least two laps, the fastest and slowest splits are automatically highlighted so you can spot your best and worst segments at a glance. You can also give any lap an optional label, like "Mile 3" or "Set 2," before recording it.
Comparing Against a Target Time
Enter a target duration — for example 5:00 for five minutes, or a plain number of seconds like 90 — and the stopwatch shows live how far ahead of or behind that target your current elapsed time is. This is handy for pacing a timed presentation, staying on schedule during an exam, or checking your progress against a personal best.
Multi-Session Tracking
Every time you press Reset after a run, the elapsed time and lap count are saved to a session history log below the stopwatch. This makes it easy to run several timing sessions back to back — such as multiple sets during a workout — and see the total combined time and the average session length without doing the math yourself.
Display Options and Shortcuts
Choose how much detail the running clock shows using the Display Precision setting — from whole seconds up to millisecond accuracy — and switch between a classic HH:MM:SS clock format or a plain decimal-seconds format. For hands-free control, keyboard shortcuts let you press Space to start, pause, or resume, L to record a lap, and R to reset; shortcuts are automatically ignored while you are typing into a text field so they never interfere with entering a lap label or target time.
Exporting Your Results
Once you have some laps recorded, use Copy Results to copy a plain-text summary of your elapsed time and lap splits to the clipboard, or Download CSV to save the full lap table as a spreadsheet-ready file for further analysis or sharing.