Time Zone Converter

How to use it

1. Pick the two zones. The tool starts from your own zone and remembers the pair in the address bar, so you can bookmark or share a specific conversion.
2. Set the date and time. It opens on now; change it to whenever your meeting is.
3. Read the warning if one appears. If a daylight saving change falls within a week either side, the tool says which zone, which direction and when.

Common conversions

Standard-time offsets. During northern summer the US, Canadian, European and UK figures shift by an hour; India, most of Asia and most of Africa do not change at all.

The last row is the one that moves most. London and Sydney are 9, 10 or 11 hours apart depending on the month, because they are in opposite hemispheres and switch at opposite times of year.

How time zones and offsets work

Every zone is defined as an offset from UTC. New York in winter is UTC−5. India is UTC+5:30 all year.

Two things make this harder than adding hours.

Not every offset is a whole number of hours. India is on a half-hour offset, as are Iran, Afghanistan, parts of Australia and Newfoundland. Nepal is on UTC+5:45, a quarter-hour offset. Any tool that stores offsets as integers gets these wrong, and a surprising number do.

Offsets are not fixed. A zone is a set of rules over time, not a number. New York is UTC−5 for part of the year and UTC−4 for the rest. Countries also change their rules — several have abandoned daylight saving in recent years, and a few have changed zone entirely. This tool reads the browser’s own time zone database rather than a hardcoded table, so it follows the current rules instead of whatever was true when the page was written.

Daylight saving is why your meeting moved

This is the single biggest source of scheduling errors, and it is not really about the clocks changing. It is about them changing on different dates.

Look at the first two rows. For roughly three weeks in March, the US has already sprung forward and Europe has not — so New York to London is four hours instead of five. In late October and early November it happens again in reverse. A recurring call that works all year is simply wrong for those few weeks.

That is what the warning on this page is for. If your date sits within seven days of a change in either zone, it tells you which one, which direction and the exact date. No other converter we looked at does this.

The hour that does not exist

When clocks go forward, an hour is skipped. In New York on 8 March 2026, the time jumps from 01:59 straight to 03:00 — so 02:30 never happens. Ask for it and this tool says so rather than quietly returning something else.

When clocks go back, an hour happens twice, and a wall-clock time in that window is genuinely ambiguous. This is why servers and databases should store timestamps in UTC and convert only for display.

EST, EDT and ET

These are not interchangeable, and treating them as such causes more one-hour errors than anything else.

People write “9am EST” in July, when the east coast is on EDT. Usually everyone guesses correctly. Occasionally somebody takes it literally and joins an hour early.

The same applies to PST/PDT, CST/CDT and GMT/BST. If you mean “whatever that place is on right now”, write ET, PT or CT — or better, write the city.

UTC right now, and why everything is stored in it

The clock at the top of the tool is the live UTC time. It ticks; you don’t have to reload.

Almost every timestamp you meet as a developer is UTC. Server logs, API responses, database rows, cron schedules, git commits, incident timelines. That’s deliberate. UTC has no daylight saving and never will, so an hour recorded in UTC means one instant and only one instant. Store local time instead and twice a year you get an hour that happens twice and an hour that never happens at all.

Which is why the awkward part isn’t storing UTC. It’s reading it back.

UTC to US time zones

Two answers per zone, because the US changes its clocks. The daylight column applies from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November.

Arizona and Hawaii don’t switch. Neither does most of the world — the US, Canada, Europe, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and a scattering of others do; India, China, Japan, most of Africa and most of South America don’t.

Is EST UTC−5 or UTC−4?

EST is UTC−5. Always. It’s a fixed offset.

But that is almost certainly not the question you’re asking. What you probably want to know is what the US east coast is on today, and the answer is: EST from November to March, EDT from March to November. Right now, in August, the east coast is on EDT, UTC−4.

This is worth being blunt about because a lot of converters get it wrong. Search for a UTC-to-EST tool and several will tell you 14:00 UTC is 09:00 EST — the winter answer — in the middle of August, when the correct answer is 10:00 EDT. They’ve hardcoded UTC−5 and labelled it EST. For roughly eight months of the year that’s an hour out.

The tool above doesn’t do that. It reads your browser’s own IANA time zone database, works out which offset is actually in force on the date you picked, names the abbreviation that applies, and tells you what the other half of the year looks like.

Converting a UTC timestamp by hand

Sometimes you just want the arithmetic. Subtract the offset for the target zone; add it going the other way.

• UTC → Eastern in summer: subtract 4 hours. 18:00 UTC − 4 = 14:00 EDT.
• UTC → Eastern in winter: subtract 5. 18:00 UTC − 5 = 13:00 EST.
• Eastern → UTC: add the same number back.
• Crossing midnight: the date moves too. 02:00 UTC is 21:00 the previous day in Los Angeles.

Two things trip people up. Half-hour offsets are real — India is UTC+5:30, Nepal UTC+5:45 — so you can’t assume whole hours. And the date change is easy to drop: a 22:00 UTC deploy is already tomorrow in Tokyo. The panel under the result shows the day shift explicitly for that reason.

Scheduling across zones

The overlap strip shows which hours fall inside 9am–5pm in both places at once. A few practical points it makes obvious:

• US east coast and western Europe have a comfortable overlap — early afternoon in London is morning in New York.
• US west coast and India have essentially none. One side takes an early morning or a late evening.
• Europe and east Asia overlap only at the very start and end of the day.
• Sydney and anywhere in the Americas is a different calendar day, not just a different hour.

For anything recurring, agree it in UTC or name the city rather than an abbreviation. “14:00 UTC” and “9am New York time” are both unambiguous. “2pm EST every Tuesday” is not, and will drift twice a year.

Worked example

A team in New York wants a 9:00 call with colleagues in Bengaluru on 15 August 2026.

• New York is on EDT in August, UTC−4. India is UTC+5:30 all year.
• The gap is 9 hours 30 minutes, so 9:00 in New York is 18:30 the same day in India.
• Come November, New York returns to EST and the gap becomes 10 hours 30 minutes. The same 9:00 call is then 19:30 in India — half an hour later into their evening, without anyone changing anything.

If that call is a standing commitment, the Indian side loses half an hour of their evening every winter. Worth knowing before you set it rather than after.

UTC and GMT

For practical purposes they are the same instant, but they are not the same kind of thing.

UTC is a time standard, defined by atomic clocks and kept within a second of the Earth’s rotation by occasional leap seconds. It has no daylight saving and never will.

GMT is a time zone that people actually live in. The UK is on GMT in winter and British Summer Time in summer. So “GMT” written in July usually means BST, which is UTC+1.

Use UTC for anything technical — logs, APIs, database timestamps, meeting invitations across many countries. Use city names for anything human.

Related

The cron expression generator shares this tool’s time zone engine, and answers the same question in a different costume: a scheduled job set in the wrong zone fails in exactly the way a meeting does. For plain date arithmetic use the date duration calculator, and for deadlines that skip weekends and holidays, the business days calculator.