How Do I Get the Current UTC Time in Python Today?

Call datetime.now(timezone.utc) to get the current UTC time in Python as a timezone-aware datetime. Avoid datetime.utcnow(), which returns a naive value and has been deprecated since Python 3.12.

The recommended way

from datetime import datetime, timezone

now = datetime.now(timezone.utc)
print(now.isoformat())

On Python 3.11+ you can also write datetime.now(datetime.UTC) after import datetime.

Why not utcnow()

utcnow() returns a datetime with no tzinfo, so later code can mistake it for local time. The Python docs recommend aware datetimes instead.

Formatting and timestamps

now.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z")
now.timestamp()

Sources

• 01docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html