Local time, everywhere you care about

Add the cities where your colleagues, friends or family live, then choose a 12-hour or 24-hour display. Search accepts city, country and time-zone names. Remove a city from its card when you no longer need it; Reset restores the starting selection.

Sort by name to find a city quickly, by UTC offset to read the board from earlier to later local times, or by added order to keep your own arrangement. Your city selection, format and sort preference are saved in this browser, so they return when you reopen the page. They do not sync to another device.

Each card shows a local date, a UTC offset and the difference from your device's time zone. A city can already be on tomorrow's date while another is still on yesterday's. For example, at 18:00 UTC on 15 January, Tokyo is at 03:00 on 16 January. Checking only the hour could put a call on the wrong day.

Offsets describe the current instant. Daylight-saving changes can alter the difference between two cities, especially when their countries change clocks on different weekends. Use the converter for a future appointment and the meeting planner to compare working hours. The live board alone does not establish the offset for next month.

The figure on the right of each card is the difference between that city and the zone your browser reports for this device, at this moment. It reads “same time” when the two agree, and otherwise a signed gap such as “+9h” or “−3h 30m”. Because it is measured against your own device, it changes when you travel, and it changes again when either side moves its clocks. It is not a fixed property of the pair of cities, so it is worth rereading rather than remembering.

A UTC offset and a time zone are not the same thing. The offset is a number, the amount a local clock is ahead of or behind UTC right now. A time zone is a named region with a rule set and a history behind it, which is why the board works from zone names rather than from numbers. Two cities that both read UTC+1 today can be an hour apart a fortnight later, because one of them observes daylight saving and the other does not. Sorting by UTC offset therefore groups cities by where they stand today, not by any lasting relationship between them.

Not every offset is a whole number of hours. India runs at UTC+05:30 and does not change clocks, Adelaide is half an hour behind Australia's eastern cities, and Newfoundland sits at UTC−03:30. Nepal and the Chatham Islands use 45-minute offsets, at UTC+05:45 and UTC+12:45 respectively. A card for one of these places prints the minutes alongside the hours, and the difference from you can end in 15, 30 or 45 minutes too. Rounding such a city to the nearest hour when you schedule a call is the usual way to arrive late.

The gaps also move for a few weeks each year. Northern and southern hemisphere countries change clocks in opposite seasons, and countries that share a hemisphere often pick different weekends. Clocks in the European Union go forward on the last Sunday in March and back on the last Sunday in October, while the United States and Canada go forward on the second Sunday in March and back on the first Sunday in November. For the weeks in between, London and New York are four hours apart rather than the five most people carry in their heads. Japan, India and much of Africa and Asia do not change their clocks at all, so their gap to a European city moves twice a year without anything happening locally. The board follows all of this on its own, because it reads the time-zone rules your browser ships; what it cannot do is tell you which rules will be in force on a date in the future.