5 Minute Timer

What a 5-minute timer is good for

Five minutes is short enough to stay focused for, but long enough to actually get something done, which is exactly why it shows up in so many everyday routines.

• A quick coffee or tea break between tasks, without losing track of time and stretching it into twenty minutes
• Brushing your teeth for the full recommended two minutes, twice over, with time to spare for flossing
• A short stretch break every hour during a long work or study session
• Timing a 5-minute plank hold or a short high-intensity exercise circuit
• A speed-tidying sprint: set 5 minutes and see how much of a room you can clear before the alarm goes off
• A quick warm-up before a longer workout, run, or sports practice
• Letting dough rest, tea steep, or a face mask sit for exactly the right amount of time
• A 5-minute meditation or breathing-exercise session for a short mental reset

How to start it

The timer above is already filled in with 5:00. Press Start and it counts straight down. You can Pause and Resume at any point if you're interrupted, or press Reset to clear it and set a different duration. Tap the fullscreen icon if you want the countdown to fill your entire screen, handy if you've propped your device up somewhere you can see it from across the room, for example during a workout.

5 minutes compared to other common durations

If 5 minutes isn't quite the length you need, here's how it compares to the other ready-made countdowns on this site, plus how to set anything in between:

The alarm, muting it, and fullscreen mode

When the 5 minutes run out, a short two-tone alarm plays (generated directly in your browser, so there's no audio file to load) along with a clear "Time's up!" message. Tap the speaker icon before you start if you'd rather work in silence, the on-screen message still appears when time's up. The fullscreen icon expands the countdown to fill your whole screen, useful for a shared display, a classroom, or just making the numbers easier to glance at from a distance while you work on something else.

Accurate even if you switch tabs

A common annoyance with browser-based timers is that they can drift when a tab is in the background, browsers deliberately slow down inactive tabs to save battery, which can make a naive second-by-second countdown fall behind. This timer avoids that problem entirely: it calculates the exact clock time your 5-minute countdown will finish the moment you press Start, and every update simply compares the current time to that fixed target. Switch to another tab to check your email while your 5 minutes run, and the time remaining will still be exactly right when you switch back.

Running several 5-minute rounds back to back

Interval-style routines, five minutes of one activity, a short break, then another five minutes, are one of the most common reasons people look for a 5-minute timer specifically. There's no dedicated "repeat" button here on purpose: instead, when one round finishes, press Reset and then Start again for a clean, deliberate next round. That small pause between rounds is often exactly when you'd want to note down a result, switch stations in a workout circuit, or swap who's speaking in a timed discussion, so it's treated as a feature rather than something to automate away. If your routine genuinely needs several different, unequal durations in sequence (for example a 5-minute warm-up followed by a 20-minute main set), set each stage's length manually as you go.