SendingTime (FIX tag 52)

UTCTimestampFIX 4.4FIX 4.2session envelope

SendingTime (tag 52) is an UTCTimestamp field defined in FIX 4.4 and FIX 4.2. It belongs to the session envelope: every FIX 4.4 message carries it, so it identifies the session rather than describing the business event.

At a glance

Tag: 52
Name: SendingTime
Datatype: UTCTimestamp (String)
Format: YYYYMMDD-HH:MM:SS[.sss]
Dialects: FIX 4.4 and FIX 4.2
Messages: 93

What the specification says

Time of message transmission (always expressed in UTC (Universal Time Coordinated, also known as "GMT")

Descriptions are quoted from the FIX Orchestra sources under the Apache 2.0 licence.

A real message using tag 52

MarketDataRequest · FIX 4.4

Tag	Field	Wire value	Meaning
8	BeginString	FIX.4.4
9	BodyLength	114
35	MsgType	V	Market Data Request
49	SenderCompID	BOARTEAM
56	TargetCompID	COUNTERPARTY
34	MsgSeqNum	2
52	SendingTime	20240101-12:00:00.000
262	MDReqID	REQ-1
263	SubscriptionRequestType	0	Snapshot
264	MarketDepth	1
267	NoMDEntryTypes1 entry	1	repeating group
269	MDEntryType	0	Bid
146	NoRelatedSym1 entry	1	repeating group
55	Symbol	EUR/USD
10	CheckSum	009

Edit and decode it yourself

Shown with | separators for readability. On the wire FIX uses SOH (0x01), an invisible control byte — and because BodyLength and CheckSum are computed over the actual bytes, the two forms have different checksums. Both are valid and both decode here.

Open in the full decoder →

Generated from the FIX 4.4 dictionary and verified at build time: it parses and validates with no issues. Open the decoder to try your own message.

Where tag 52 appears

Session envelope field

Tag 52 appears in every one of the 93 FIX 4.4 message types, because it is part of the standard header or trailer. Listing them all would say nothing useful — it is present on anything you will ever decode.

Wire format

A UTC date and time. The fractional-seconds part is optional, so two timestamps can be equal but not byte-identical. @boarteam/fix keeps the value as a string; format rules are checked by validate(), which reports validate/invalid-value rather than throwing.

Read tag 52 in TypeScript

decode.tsts

import { createFixEngine } from "@boarteam/fix";import { dictionary } from "@boarteam/fix-dict-fix44";const fix = createFixEngine(dictionary);const { message, issues } = fix.parse(raw);const field = message.fields[52];field?.name;   // "SendingTime"field?.raw;    // the verbatim wire stringfield?.value;  // coerced to a string

Decode this in your own code

The same engine that produced the decoded example above is an Apache-2.0 npm package with zero runtime dependencies. It runs in Node and in the browser, and parse() returns problems as data instead of throwing.

npm i @boarteam/fix @boarteam/fix-dict-fix44

Try the decoder Source on GitHub