FIX Protocol Tag 52: SendingTime

Practical notes on SendingTime

SendingTime is the UTC time the message was sent. It is a required header field on every message.

• Format: YYYYMMDD-HH:MM:SS, optionally with fractional seconds, always UTC with no time zone suffix.
• Set it when the message is written to the socket, not when the order was created; TransactTime (60) carries the business time.
• Receivers compare it with their own clock. QuickFIX allows 120 seconds by default before rejecting with SessionRejectReason 10.
• On a replay, SendingTime is the time of the replay and the original goes in OrigSendingTime (122).

Common mistakes

• Local time instead of UTC: the message is hours off and is rejected, then the session logs out.
• Microsecond or nanosecond precision sent to an engine that only accepts milliseconds.

See also:SendingTime accuracy problem (373=10)

Tag 52 in each FIX version

Values and message usage as defined in a specific version.

• FIX 4.0
• FIX 4.1
• FIX 4.2
• FIX 4.3
• FIX 4.4
• FIX 5.0
• FIX 5.0 SP1
• FIX 5.0 SP2

Data type

UTCTIMESTAMP: Date and time in UTC as YYYYMMDD-HH:MM:SS, optionally followed by fractions of a second (.sss).

Example

52=20261020-14:30:05.123

Illustrative value. In a message, fields are separated by the SOH character (0x01), often shown as | or ^ in logs.

Message types that use tag 52

SendingTime belongs to the standard message header, which every FIX message carries, so it is not listed against individual message types.