Current Time in Every City & Country

Last updated: March 23, 2026

What Is a World Clock?

A world clock is exactly what it sounds like: a single place to see what time it is right now, anywhere on Earth. Before the internet, travelers kept multiple watches set to different cities. Traders phoning Tokyo at midnight calculated mentally. Flight crews taped handwritten UTC offset charts to cockpit walls.

Today, every smartphone knows the time in São Paulo. But most people still stumble on the same questions: Is Sydney 14 or 15 hours ahead? (It depends on DST.)When does India's business day overlap with London? (Only three hours, in the afternoon.) Why does Nepal observe UTC+05:45? (A deliberate 30-minute offset from India, standardized in 1956 to assert national distinctiveness.) CurrentTimeIn answers all of those questions in under a second.

All clocks are powered by the IANA Time Zone Database, the same source used by Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, Java, and Python. Every government timezone decision, every DST rule change, every newly recognized territory gets committed to that database, and our clocks reflect it.

How Time Zones Actually Work

The Earth rotates 360 degrees in 24 hours, 15 degrees per hour. In theory, each 15-degree band of longitude should observe a different hour. In practice, time zones bend around political borders, coastlines, and trade corridors. China spans five theoretical zones but observes a single one (UTC+08:00) for national unity. Russia spans 11 zones. France technically spans 12 when you count overseas territories: making it the country with the most time zones in the world.

Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is the reference point. It's derived from International Atomic Time (TAI) with occasional leap seconds to keep pace with the Earth's slightly irregular rotation. UTC never observes Daylight Saving Time. Every timezone on Earth is an offset from UTC: UTC+05:30 for India, UTC−05:00 for New York in winter, UTC+09:00 for Tokyo year-round.

Daylight Saving Time (DST) is the practice of advancing clocks by one hour in spring and returning them in autumn. Roughly 70 countries observe it, including most of Europe and North America. Japan, China, India, and most of Africa do not. When DST is active, New York shifts from UTC−05:00 to UTC−04:00; London shifts from UTC+00:00 to UTC+01:00. DST transition dates differ between the northern and southern hemispheres, and between individual countries, creating brief annual windows where the offset between two cities temporarily changes.

How to Use This World Clock

Search any city or country in the bar above. You'll see the current local time, UTC offset, IANA timezone identifier (e.g., Asia/Kolkata), and whether DST is active. Country pages list all timezones within that country and a grid of major cities. City pages include an hour-by-hour conversion table to eliminate the mental math from cross-timezone scheduling.

The Time Difference tool shows the current offset between any two locations and highlights the window where both cities are within standard business hours (09:00–18:00 local time). Search for your city and your contact's city to find when both are available without anyone working at 2am.

Why Timezone Accuracy Matters

A one-hour timezone error costs airlines millions in scheduling penalties annually. In 2016, a DST misread caused alarm clocks in Australia to wake people an hour early. Medical appointment systems that ignore DST transitions have scheduled procedures at the wrong time. Financial contracts specifying settlement "at 4:00 PM" require knowing exactly which timezone, and whether that timezone currently observes DST.

For individuals, the consequences are more prosaic but no less frustrating: missed video calls, flights nearly missed, payroll processed a day early or late. Getting the time right, in the right timezone, is a solved problem, and this site exists to make that solution instantly accessible for every city on Earth.

About Our Data

Timezone rules come from the IANA Time Zone Database (tz database / zoneinfo), maintained by IANA since 2011 and updated multiple times per year as governments announce changes. It covers 600+ named timezones and is the authoritative source used by every major operating system, programming language, and web service worldwide.

City and country data is sourced from GeoNames, a geographical database of over 25 million places (CC BY 4.0). Time calculations use Luxon, which wraps the browser's native Intl.DateTimeFormat API.