The world's time zones, and what time it is in each of them
Every one of the 419 time zones this site publishes, plotted on the map and listed underneath by the offset it is keeping at this instant. There are 37 distinct offsets in force right now, from UTC-11 to UTC+14, and it is 13:27 UTC as this page was served. Click any point on the map, or any identifier in the list, to open that zone's page.
Each swatch prints its own offset, so the map can be read without separating the colours. Hovering or tabbing to an entry isolates that band on the map, and following it jumps to that band in the list below.
1,143 points across 37 UTC offsets, each one coloured by the offset its zone is reading right now and each one clicking through to that zone. It loads when you scroll to it, so it costs the rest of the page nothing. Every zone is also listed as text below.
Skip to the offset listWhat the map actually shows
The coloured dots are places, not borders. Each one sits on a real coordinate, a city, a national capital or the reference point of a zone, and takes the colour of the UTC offset that its zone is reading at the moment the page was built. Run your eye down the map and the bands appear on their own, because people settle along rivers and coasts and the clocks were set to follow them, not because anything here has been drawn around a boundary.
That is a deliberate choice rather than a shortcut taken quietly. The complete set of time zone boundaries comes from one place, the timezone-boundary-builder project, and it is tens of megabytes carrying share-alike licence obligations over anything derived from it. Shipping that to draw a shape, on a page whose real question is what time it is somewhere, is the wrong trade. A dot can carry something a polygon never can: it can tell you the clock reading, and it can hand you the page that explains the rule behind it.
Where the method is weak, it is weak in the open ocean, across Antarctica and through the empty interiors of wide countries, and the map simply has nothing to say there. Nothing is being implied about where one zone stops and the next begins. For the boundary itself, the country and city pages are the honest route: they name the places, and the places are what the boundary is made of.
Every offset in force right now
The list below is the page, not a fallback for it. 37 offsets, every zone on each one, and a live clock for each band. The largest group is UTC+2 with 50 zones; the smallest bands hold a single zone apiece. Nothing here is a stored table: every offset is read from the IANA database inside Node at the instant of the request, so it is right on both sides of every daylight saving change.
The offsets that are not whole hours
11 of the 37 offsets in force are not a whole number of hours from UTC: UTC-9:30, UTC-2:30, UTC+3:30, UTC+4:30, UTC+5:30, UTC+5:45, UTC+6:30, UTC+8:45, UTC+9:30, UTC+10:30, UTC+12:45. 8 of them are half hours and 3 are three quarters of one. They exist because a country set its clocks near its own meridian rather than snapping to the nearest hour line, and they are the single most common thing for software to get wrong, because a zone stored as an integer number of hours simply cannot hold them.
India is the one everybody meets: a country 3,000 kilometres wide keeping one clock at UTC+5:30, so a timestamp converted into it changes the minutes as well as the hour. Nepal went further and sits 15 minutes ahead of India. The Chatham Islands, 800 kilometres east of New Zealand, keep 45 minutes ahead of the mainland, and Eucla on the Nullarbor keeps 45 minutes behind the rest of Western Australia on an offset shared by a few hundred people.
Why the bands are not straight lines
A tidy world would put one hour of clock on every 15 degrees of longitude, and none of it would need a map. What actually happened is that offsets are set by governments, for reasons of trade, administration and politics, and the result bulges. China runs a single offset across a span that would justify five. Spain sits west of Greenwich and keeps central European time. Several Pacific states moved themselves across the date line outright, which is why the far right of the legend runs past twelve hours and the far left stops short of it.
Daylight saving then moves about half of these bands twice a year, and the two hemispheres move in opposite directions, so the gap between London and Sydney is not one number. This map is drawn fresh at every request precisely because of that: the colours you are looking at are the offsets in force now, not a picture of how things stood in some particular week.
Reading the legend
Each legend entry carries its offset printed inside the swatch, the current clock reading on that offset, and the number of zones keeping it. The colour ramp runs west to east, and the lightness alternates from band to band, so two neighbouring offsets differ in brightness as well as in hue and stay apart in greyscale or under a colour filter. Hovering or tabbing to an entry isolates that band on the map; following it jumps to the same band in the list, where every zone is plain text.
Where to go next
Questions
- How many time zones are there in the world?
- 419 zone identifiers in the IANA database this site publishes, which between them read 37 different offsets at this instant. The two numbers are not the same, and neither is 24: many zones share a clock today while carrying different rules for tomorrow, and the range runs from UTC-11 to UTC+14.
- Is it the same date everywhere on this map?
- No. Right now 2 different calendar dates are in force across the bands, because the spread from UTC-11 to UTC+14 is 25 hours, which is more than a day. That is the normal state of affairs rather than an edge case.
- Does this map show time zone boundaries?
- It does not, and it does not pretend to. Each dot is a place with a real coordinate, coloured by the offset its zone is keeping. The bands you can see are produced by where people live, which is also what the boundaries were drawn around.
- Why do some offsets have 30 or 45 minutes in them?
- Because a government set its clock near its own meridian instead of the nearest hour line. UTC-9:30, UTC-2:30, UTC+3:30, UTC+4:30, UTC+5:30, UTC+5:45, UTC+6:30, UTC+8:45, UTC+9:30, UTC+10:30, UTC+12:45 are the ones in force at this instant, covering India, Nepal, Iran, Afghanistan, Myanmar, central Australia and the Chatham Islands among others.
- What happens to the map when the clocks change?
- It changes with them. Every offset here is read at the moment of the request, so a zone that moves its clock on Sunday morning moves between bands on this page at the same instant, and the legend, the colours and the list all follow it.