Time Zone Converter

What is a time zone converter?

A time zone converter shows what time it is in another place when you know the time in your own. You choose a starting time, add the cities you care about, and the tool lists the local time in each one, together with the date, so you can see at once whether it is morning, evening or the middle of the night.

It is useful for everyone who works, studies, travels or keeps in touch across borders. You can use it to book a call with a client in another country, join a live event, call family abroad or check the time before you travel.

How to use the time zone converter

• Step 1: Check your starting time: The tool opens with the live time of your own city. To plan a future time, change the date and time.
• Step 2: Add cities: Type a city or country in the search box and pick it from the list. You can compare up to 10 places.
• Step 3: Read the results: Each city shows its time, its date, the difference in hours and a label that tells you whether people there are at work, in the evening or asleep.
• Step 4: Change the start: Press Set as start on any city to use its time as the starting point.
• Step 5: Copy: Use Copy all times to paste the list into an email, a chat or a calendar invitation.

How time zones work

The Earth turns once a day, so the sun is overhead in different places at different times. To keep clocks sensible, the world is divided into time zones. Each zone is defined by how far it is from UTC, short for Coordinated Universal Time, the world standard that does not change with the seasons.

Most zones are a whole number of hours from UTC, but not all. India is UTC+5:30, Nepal is UTC+5:45 and parts of Australia use UTC+9:30. Some countries are large enough to have several zones, and some, such as China, use a single zone for the whole country.

Daylight saving time

Many countries move their clocks forward by one hour in spring and back in autumn, which is called daylight saving time or summer time. It is the biggest reason why time zone sums go wrong, because the difference between two cities can change twice a year.

The rules are not the same everywhere. The United States changes its clocks on the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday of November, while the European Union changes on the last Sunday of March and the last Sunday of October. For a few weeks each year the gap between New York and London is one hour shorter than usual. Many countries, including Pakistan, India, Japan, China and the United Arab Emirates, do not use daylight saving time at all.

Our converter reads the rules from your browser, so it uses the correct offset for the exact date you pick. Try a date in March or October and watch the differences move.

An example: noon in London

In winter, when London is on UTC+0, 12:00 noon in London is 7:00 AM in New York, 4:00 PM in Dubai, 5:00 PM in Karachi, 5:30 PM in Delhi and 9:00 PM in Tokyo. In summer London moves to UTC+1, so the same noon is 7:00 AM in New York only because New York has also moved its clocks, while Dubai, Karachi, Delhi and Tokyo, which do not change, become one hour earlier on the clock: 3:00 PM, 4:00 PM, 4:30 PM and 8:00 PM.

Why the date can be different

Places east of you are ahead and places west of you are behind, so when it is late evening in one city, it can already be tomorrow elsewhere. At 9:00 PM on Sunday in New York, it is already 11:00 AM on Monday in Tokyo. The converter shows a Next day or Previous day label, so you never confuse the date when you set a deadline or a meeting.

Tips for scheduling across time zones

• Write the time zone: Always add the zone to an invitation, such as 3:00 PM London time, or use UTC for clarity.
• Look for overlap: Use the working hours label to find a slot where everyone is awake and at work.
• Be careful in March, April, October and November: Countries change their clocks on different dates, so the usual gap may be off by an hour for a few weeks.
• Share the burden: If one team always meets at night, rotate the meeting time.
• Check the date, too: A deadline of Friday evening in one country may already be Saturday in another.

Time zone names and abbreviations

Abbreviations such as CST or IST are ambiguous. CST can mean Central Standard Time in the United States, China Standard Time or Cuba Standard Time, and IST can mean India, Ireland or Israel. For this reason this tool works with real places, which are identified by names such as Asia/Karachi and America/New_York in the international IANA time zone database.

Why use our free time zone converter?

• Automatic daylight saving: The right offset for the exact date you choose.
• Any city: Hundreds of cities and zones, with up to 10 on screen at once.
• Helpful labels: Day difference, hours ahead or behind, and working hours or night.
• Live or planned: Watch the clocks now, or set any date and time in the future or the past.
• Private and free: Nothing is uploaded, and there is no signup or limit.