Common Years to Seconds (yr (365) to s)
1 common year equals 31,536,000 seconds exactly.
How to convert common years to seconds
To convert common years to seconds, multiply the number of common years by 31,536,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply seconds by 3.170979198×10⁻⁸ (rounded).
seconds = common years × 31,536,000
Example: 10 common years = 315,360,000 seconds.
Months and years are not constant. This site uses the average Gregorian year of 365.2425 days, so one 'year' converts to 365.2425 days, not 365; use 'common year' for exactly 365 days.
About these units
Common Year (yr (365))
A calendar year of exactly 365 days, without a leap day.
Calendar makers needed whole numbers of days, so the common year is simply 365 of them, or 31,536,000 seconds at 86,400 seconds per day. It makes up 303 of every 400 years in the Gregorian calendar. Because 365 is 52 weeks plus one day, a common year begins and ends on the same weekday, and each date falls one weekday later than the year before.
The trouble is that the Earth takes about 365.24 days to complete a cycle of seasons, so a common year runs roughly 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds short of the tropical year. The shortfall adds up to a full day in about four years, which is why leap years exist. NIST lists the 365-day year as an exact conversion, while its tropical and sidereal years are measured quantities that differ in the fifth significant figure.
1 common year = 31,536,000 seconds (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Common year; NIST SP 811 Appendix B.8: factors for units outside the SI
Second (s)
The SI base unit of time, defined by the radiation frequency of the cesium-133 atom: 9,192,631,770 cycles per second.
Our word second is a leftover of Latin. Medieval scholars divided a degree, and later the hour, into 60 parts called pars minuta prima, the first small part, and divided those again into pars minuta secunda, the second small part. NIST traces the roots further back: Babylonian and Greek astronomers split the circle into 360 degrees, and around 150 C.E. Ptolemy split each degree into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds. Clocks that could show seconds appeared only in the later 16th century, and Christiaan Huygens's pendulum clock of 1656 was the first able to keep time accurately to the second.
For most of history the second was a fraction of a day, and in 1956 it was redefined as a fraction of the tropical year, a definition the SI took over in 1960. In 1967 the 13th CGPM switched to atoms: 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation tied to a hyperfine transition of caesium-133. The 2019 SI revision restated this by fixing the caesium frequency at 9,192,631,770 hertz. NIST reports that commercial caesium clocks stay within about a three-millionth of a second per year, and experimental clocks based on other atoms are roughly ten thousand times more precise.
The second is the reference unit for time on this site.
Sources: NIST: the second and the SI redefinition; BIPM: SI Brochure, 9th edition; Wikipedia: Second
Related conversions
- Seconds to common years (reverse)
- Common years to minutes
- Common years to hours
- Common years to days
- Common years to weeks
- Common years to months
- Common years to years
- Minutes to seconds
- Hours to seconds
- Days to seconds
- Weeks to seconds
- Months to seconds
- Years to seconds
- Milliseconds to seconds
- Microseconds to seconds
- Nanoseconds to seconds
- Decades to seconds
- Centuries to seconds
- Millennia to seconds
See all time units.