How to use the JWT Formatter
Decode any JWT in seconds — paste, inspect, and understand your token with no setup required.
Paste your JWT
Copy your JSON Web Token — typically from an Authorization header, a cookie, or your application's local storage — and paste it into the input field. The tool accepts standard three-part (header.payload.signature) JWTs as well as JWTs prefixed with 'Bearer '.
Inspect the decoded sections
The formatter immediately splits the token at its dot delimiters, Base64url-decodes each part, and pretty-prints the Header and Payload as formatted JSON in separate panels. The Signature section is displayed as-is along with a note that signature verification requires the secret key, which is never requested.
Review claims and timestamps
Any Unix timestamp fields (iat, exp, nbf) are automatically converted and displayed alongside their human-readable local equivalents. Standard registered claim names are annotated with plain-English descriptions so you can confirm the token's issuer, subject, audience, and expiry at a glance.
When to use this tool
Reach for JWT Formatter whenever you need to quickly understand what's inside a token — during development, debugging, or security review.
- →Checking whether an access token has expired by inspecting the exp claim converted to a readable local timestamp.
- →Debugging an authentication issue by verifying the sub and iss claims match what your identity provider should be issuing.
- →Reviewing the roles or scopes encoded in a JWT's payload to confirm authorization logic is behaving correctly.
- →Onboarding new team members by showing them exactly what fields your auth tokens carry and what each claim means.
- →Validating the algorithm declared in the header (alg) to ensure tokens are signed with the expected method (e.g., RS256 vs HS256).
- →Quickly inspecting a token from a third-party OAuth provider to understand its structure before writing parsing logic.