🌍 Time Zone Converter

Convert time between major world time zones instantly. Perfect for international meetings, travel, and remote team coordination.

Convert Time Between Time Zones

Note: Conversion accounts for your browser's built-in timezone data. During DST transitions, results may vary by 1 hour. Verify with local sources for critical scheduling.

Understanding Time Zones: A Global Communications Guide

The world is divided into approximately 24 standard time zones, each roughly corresponding to 15 degrees of geographic longitude (360° ÷ 24 = 15°). However, for political and economic convenience, actual time zone boundaries follow country and regional borders rather than precise geographic meridians. This explains seemingly curious cases like China (a geographically wide country) using a single time zone, or India using UTC+5:30 rather than a whole-hour offset.

Why Time Zone Conversion Matters

In our interconnected global economy, time zone management has become a critical professional skill. Remote work has accelerated this need dramatically — teams now span multiple continents regularly. Common time zone scenarios include:

  • Business meetings: Finding an overlap window that's reasonable for all attendees across time zones
  • International travel: Understanding arrival times in destination time zones, jet lag calculation
  • Financial markets: Market hours for NYSE, LSE, TSE, and other exchanges in local vs. home time
  • Live events: Sports broadcasts, webinars, product launches promoted to global audiences
  • Customer support: Knowing business hours overlap between support team location and customer location
  • Software development: Scheduling deployments, on-call rotations, and server maintenance windows

Key Time Zone Reference Points

City / Region Time Zone UTC Offset (Winter)
London, UK GMT / BST UTC+0 / UTC+1
New York, USA EST / EDT UTC-5 / UTC-4
Dubai, UAE GST UTC+4 (no DST)
Tokyo, Japan JST UTC+9 (no DST)
Sydney, Australia AEST / AEDT UTC+10 / UTC+11
New Delhi, India IST UTC+5:30 (no DST)

Frequently Asked Questions

UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) is the global time standard that serves as the reference point for all other time zones. It is essentially the same as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) but is more precisely defined using atomic clocks. All time zones are expressed as UTC plus or minus an offset. For example, Eastern Standard Time (EST) is UTC-5, meaning 5 hours behind UTC.
Most time zones use whole-hour offsets from UTC, but several countries use non-standard offsets for geographic or political reasons. India uses UTC+5:30, Iran uses UTC+3:30, and Nepal uses UTC+5:45. These represent the best compromise between solar time for their geographic position and practical alignment with neighboring countries' time zones.
Daylight Saving Time (DST) is a seasonal practice of advancing clocks by one hour during summer months to extend evening daylight. The US, UK, and most of Europe observe DST, while countries near the equator (including most of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East) do not. DST transitions happen on different dates in different countries, meaning the time offset between two locations can shift during transition weeks. Our converter uses JavaScript's built-in timezone library, which accounts for current DST rules automatically.