Meditation Timer

A meditation timer does one job: it keeps time quietly and marks the beginning and end of a sit with a bell, so there is no reason to open your eyes and check a clock. This page is that timer and nothing else. It counts a session down in silence, adds a short settling period before the sit begins, and can sound a bell at a fixed interval during longer sessions. There is no guided voice, no music, and no breathing pattern to follow — only silence between bells.

The three fields

"Session (min)" is the length of the sit itself and defaults to 10 minutes. "Settling time (sec)" is a short countdown that runs before the sit starts and defaults to 15 seconds. "Interval bell every (min, 0 = off)" adds a bell at a repeating interval during the session and defaults to 0, which turns intervals off entirely. Settling time is counted separately from the session, so a ten-minute session with fifteen seconds of settling occupies 10:15 in total rather than taking fifteen seconds out of the sit.

How a session runs from Start to the closing bells

Pressing Start does not begin the sit immediately. The settling countdown runs first, which gives you time to set the device down, arrange your posture, and stop thinking about the screen. When it reaches zero a bell sounds to mark the start of the sit. From that point the timer counts down without any sound at all, unless an interval bell is set. When the session reaches zero, three bells sound to close it. That three-bell ending is deliberate: a single tone at the end can be mistaken for an interval bell or an unrelated notification, while three in sequence is unambiguous even with your eyes closed.

What interval bells are used for

An interval bell divides a long sit into segments. In group practice this is commonly done to mark a change of posture, to separate two parts of a longer session, or simply to give a reference point in a stretch of silence that is otherwise featureless. Setting the field to 15 during a forty-five-minute session produces bells at the fifteen- and thirty-minute points, splitting the sit into three equal segments. Leaving the field at 0 removes intervals completely, so the only sounds in the whole session are the opening bell and the three that close it. The display keeps a running note of how many interval bells have sounded, which is a useful thing to glance at afterward when you are working out how far into a session something happened.

The four presets

"5 minutes" sets a short session with no interval bell. "10 min · bell every 5" is a ten-minute sit with a single interval bell at the halfway point, followed by the three closing bells. "20 min · bell every 10" applies the same halfway structure to a longer session. "45 min · bell every 15" is the longest preset and produces the three-segment structure described above. Each preset fills the session and interval fields in one tap, and both remain editable afterward, so a preset can act as a starting point for a length that sits between the four offered.

What the display shows

The main readout is the remaining time in MM:SS. Below it is the current phase, which reads "Settling" during the opening countdown, "Sitting" during the session itself, "Paused" when the clock is held, and "Session complete" once the closing bells have sounded. The interval line reports how many interval bells have played so far. Fullscreen mode enlarges the readout so it can be read from a cushion several feet away without leaning toward the screen, which also makes the phase label easy to confirm at a glance if you are unsure whether the settling period has ended.

Pause, Reset, and what they do to the session

Pause stops the clock and holds the remaining time in place, and starting again resumes from that exact second rather than restarting the session or the settling period. Reset returns the timer to the beginning with your field values intact, so the next sit can start without re-entering anything. Because the session is counted down rather than up, a paused session does not accumulate the pause into its own length: a twenty-minute session that is paused for two minutes still delivers twenty minutes of sitting time.

A timer, not a guided session

Most meditation apps in 2026 bundle a timer inside a much larger product built around guided audio, courses, and accounts. This page has none of that. It is silence with bells, which is the format used in many practice traditions where the bell is the only external cue and everything between the bells is left alone. If what you want instead is a paced breathing cue — a visible inhale, hold, and exhale rhythm to follow — the breathing timer is the tool for that, since it counts individual breath phases rather than a single block of time.

Running in a browser tab

The timer runs in the browser tab and the tab has to stay open for the session to keep counting, so closing the browser or the tab ends the session. The bells come from the device's own speaker, which means the device volume needs to be set before you start rather than adjusted mid-sit. A tablet or a spare laptop placed face down or turned away works well for this, since the sound reaches you without the screen being in view. On a phone, keeping the screen on avoids any question of what the browser does when the device sleeps.

Related tools

For a paced inhale, hold, and exhale cycle rather than a block of silence, use the breathing timer. For a plain countdown with no bells or phases, use the online timer. To be alerted at a specific clock time instead of after a duration, see the alarm clock. The sleep calculator works out bedtimes and wake times from typical cycle lengths, and the time tools hub lists every timer and clock on the site.