What time zone am I in?

Major time zones at a glance

Offsets below are computed from the IANA rules for mid January and mid July 2026. A zone with two different values moves its clocks during the year. Southern hemisphere zones such as Sydney move them the other way round, so their summer offset shows up in January.

How to use it

1. Open the page. Your time zone, live local time and UTC offset appear at once, read from your device. Nothing to click, no permission prompt.
2. Read the daylight saving line to see whether summer time is in effect, and the next clock change line for the date and direction of the next change.
3. To check somewhere else, search a city or address, click the map, or tap Use GPS if your device zone looks wrong. The panel then also shows how far ahead or behind your own clock that place is.
4. Press Copy link to this result to share the zone. The link opens to the same zone with the time live for whoever opens it.

How the page knows your time zone without asking

Every phone and computer stores a time zone setting so it can show the right clock. Browsers expose that setting through the standard Intl API. The page reads it the moment it loads, which is why your answer is instant and no permission dialog appears. No location is sent anywhere for this step.

Most devices set the zone automatically from the mobile network or from the location service. If you turned that off, or set the zone by hand before a trip, the device zone may not match where you are. In that case tap Use GPS: the page sends your coordinates to Open-Meteo, which returns the zone that covers that point on its time zone map.

A VPN does not change the answer. It hides your IP address, but the page never uses the IP address. It reads the clock setting on your device or, with GPS, your actual position.

Daylight saving time explained

Daylight saving time moves clocks one hour ahead for part of the year so that evenings get more daylight. The rules are set by each country, and sometimes each state or province, so two places on the same offset in winter can differ in summer.

United States

Federal law (15 U.S.C. 260a) starts daylight saving at 2:00 a.m. local time on the second Sunday of March and ends it at 2:00 a.m. on the first Sunday of November. A state may opt out and stay on standard time all year. Hawaii and most of Arizona do; the Navajo Nation in northeastern Arizona still moves its clocks. Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands do not use daylight saving time.

Europe

In the European Union, Directive 2000/84/EC moves every member state at the same instant: 01:00 UTC on the last Sunday of March and the last Sunday of October. London, Paris and Helsinki change at the same moment even though their local clock readings differ.

Southern hemisphere

Summer falls in December, so places such as southeastern Australia, New Zealand and most of Chile move their clocks forward in September or October and back in March or April. That is why the gap between New York and Sydney changes twice a year, by a different amount in each season.

Places without daylight saving

Most of Africa and Asia, almost all of the tropics, and countries such as Japan, China, India and Russia keep one offset all year. The tool shows "Not observed" for these zones and lists no next change.

US time zones

US law (15 U.S.C. 261) defines nine standard time zones: Atlantic, Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, Alaska, Hawaii-Aleutian, Samoa and Chamorro. The 50 states use six of them; Atlantic covers Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, Samoa covers American Samoa, and Chamorro covers Guam and the Northern Marianas.

Several states are split between two zones, including Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Michigan, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Oregon and Idaho. In those states, the county you are in decides the zone. The US time zone map colors each state by the zone of its capital, and the county finder tells you which county a point is in.

What people check their time zone for

Meetings across zones

Before sending an invite to colleagues abroad, check both zones and the next clock change. A weekly 9:00 call between New York and London shifts by an hour for a few weeks each spring and autumn, because the US and Europe change on different dates.

Travel and jet lag

After landing, the page confirms that your phone picked up the local zone. Search your destination before the trip to see its offset and whether a clock change falls during your stay.

Servers, cron jobs and logs

Software should store the IANA zone name, not a fixed offset. A job scheduled at 02:30 in a zone that springs forward at 02:00 will not run that night, because 02:30 does not exist on that date. The next change shown here tells you when to expect that.

Calendar and booking forms

Many forms ask for a time zone by city name. Copy the zone name from the result, for example America/Denver, to pick the right entry rather than a generic Mountain Time label that may or may not observe daylight saving.

Live events and deadlines

Broadcast times, product launches and filing deadlines are often given in one zone, such as Eastern Time or UTC. Compare that zone with yours using the time difference calculator.

Support and on-call schedules

Teams spread across zones share a link to this page with the zone in the address, so everyone sees the same local time and offset for the office that matters.

Methodology and limitations

Your own zone. The page reads the zone name your browser reports through Intl.DateTimeFormat. It is only as right as your device setting.

Another place. Search uses the Photon geocoder to turn a place name into coordinates. GPS uses your device. In both cases, and for map clicks, Open-Meteo's forecast API with timezone=auto returns the zone name for the point.

Offset, daylight saving and next change. These are computed in your browser from the IANA time zone database built into it. Standard time is taken as the smaller of the January and July offsets, so the test works in both hemispheres. The next change is found by checking the offset day by day for up to a year, then narrowing to the minute. Browsers update their copy of the database with normal updates, so a rule change announced at short notice may show up late.

Near a boundary. Zone lines follow county, state and national borders. A point close to a line can fall on either side depending on the detail of Open-Meteo's zone map. Some communities follow a neighbor's time by local custom, which no map shows.

Sharing. After a lookup, the address bar holds the zone, the coordinates and the place name, such as #tz=Europe/Paris. Anyone who opens that link sees the same zone, with times shown live for the moment they open it.

Time zone terms

UTC: Coordinated Universal Time, the reference clock that all offsets count from. It never changes for daylight saving.

GMT: Greenwich Mean Time. As a clock reading it equals UTC. As a zone label in the UK, it applies only in winter; summer time there is BST, one hour ahead.

UTC offset: the difference between local time and UTC, such as UTC-05:00. Offsets are not always whole hours: India uses +05:30 and Nepal +05:45.

IANA zone name: an Area/City label such as America/New_York that carries the full history of a region's clock rules. Software uses these names.

Abbreviation: short labels like EST, EDT or CST. They are not unique. CST means Central Standard Time in the US and China Standard Time in China, which is why the tool shows the full name too.

Tips for scheduling across zones

Write meeting times with the zone name or city, such as 10:00 America/Chicago, rather than CST or CDT alone. Abbreviations repeat between countries and are often used for the wrong half of the year.

For recurring events, check the next clock change in each zone. The US and Europe change on different weekends, so for a few weeks each spring and autumn the gap between them is one hour smaller than usual.