Convert a time between time zones

How it works

A reading on a clock is not a moment. "Nine in the morning" describes a moment only once you say whose morning, because the same instant is nine somewhere and midnight somewhere else. Converting means going one step down and one step back up: from a clock reading plus a zone to the single instant it identifies, then from that instant out to every other clock you care about. This page does both halves and shows the instant it landed on, so the answer can be checked rather than trusted.

An offset belongs to a moment, not to a place

India is UTC+05:30 all year. Most of Europe and North America are two different offsets depending on the month, and which month the change falls in has moved several times inside living memory. Iran stopped observing daylight saving in 2022. Mexico dropped it for most of the country the same year. Any table of offsets someone types into a program begins slightly wrong and gets worse.

So there is no such table here. The zone rules come from the IANA database that ships inside the browser and gets updated with it, read through the standard formatting interface. What this page contributes is the arithmetic on top, done in whole minutes because Kathmandu is three quarters of an hour off the hour and rounding it away would be a wrong answer rather than an imprecise one.

The hour that does not exist

On 8 March 2026 the clocks in New York go from 01:59:59 to 03:00:00. Ask for 02:30 that morning and you have named a reading that no clock in that zone ever showed. A converter that quietly returns something has to have guessed. This one says the reading was skipped and moves the answer forward by the length of the jump, giving 03:30, which is the behaviour calendar software settled on because a meeting scheduled into a gap still needs to happen.

And the hour that happens twice

The reverse case is worse, because it produces an answer that looks fine. On 1 November 2026, New York clocks reach 02:00 and go back to 01:00, so 01:30 arrives twice: once at 05:30 UTC and again an hour later at 06:30 UTC. Two different instants, one clock reading, and nothing in the reading itself to separate them. Here you get told, given the earlier one, and shown what the later one would be, which is enough to resolve it from context.

South of the equator, everything runs backwards

Sydney is UTC+11 in January and UTC+10 in July, because summer there is the northern winter. Combine that with New York moving the other way and the gap between the two cities is not one number: it is 16 hours in January, 15 hours through most of the year, and 14 hours for the fortnight in autumn when only one of them has changed. Every one of those windows is a fortnight where a hardcoded difference is off by an hour.

Whole hours are not the rule

Kolkata is 30 minutes off the hour, Kathmandu 45, Eucla in Western Australia 45, and the Chatham Islands 45 minutes past a 12 hour offset. Newfoundland is 30 minutes off and does observe daylight saving, so it moves between two half-hour offsets. Lord Howe Island goes further and shifts by only 30 minutes when its clocks change, the only place on earth that does. These are no mere curiosity: the half-hour zones alone cover most of the Indian subcontinent.

Two calendar days at once

Kiritimati keeps UTC+14 and Pago Pago keeps UTC-11, 25 hours apart, which is more hours than a day has. One instant therefore falls on two different dates depending where you read it, and for one hour in every 24 the two islands are on dates two days apart. Any conversion between a far-eastern and a far-western zone can change the day, so each result here says when the date has moved and by how much.