It is 4:17 pm in Africa/Johannesburg

Africa/Johannesburg is the IANA identifier for the time zone of Johannesburg in South Africa. It is running at UTC+2 right now, abbreviated SAST, and the local date is Saturday, September 26, 2026. The zone never moves its clocks.

What time is it in Africa/Johannesburg right now

4:17 pm on Saturday, September 26, 2026, as this page was served, which in 24 hour form is 16:17. The clock above ticks on from there in your own browser. The offset is a whole 2 hours ahead of UTC, so a UTC timestamp converts here by changing the hour and leaving the minutes exactly as they are.

49 other zones read UTC+2 at this instant. They are interchangeable as a clock reading today and not as an identifier: storing UTC+2 instead of Africa/Johannesburg throws away the rule that decides what they all do at the next transition.

The UTC offset of Africa/Johannesburg

An offset of UTC+2 names the meridian 30.0 degrees east. Johannesburg, South Africa actually sits at 28.05 degrees east, which is 2.0 degrees west of it, so the sun there runs about 8 minutes behind the clock before daylight saving is even considered. Zone boundaries are drawn by borders and by convenience, not by longitude, and this is the size of the gap that produces.

Because this zone never moves its clocks, UTC+2 is the answer on every day of the year. That makes it an easy zone to schedule against, with the caveat that the other end of the call may still be moving its own clocks, so the gap between the two changes even though nothing changed here.

Daylight saving in Africa/Johannesburg

Africa/Johannesburg does not observe daylight saving. It sits at UTC+2 in January and reads UTC+2 again in July, so a gap worked out against it today is still right in six months. It has not moved its clocks in any year since 1970 that this page can see.

The database holds no clock change for Africa/Johannesburg in 2025, 2026 or 2027, so there is no transition table to print. The offset shown at the top of this page is the offset on every date in those three years.

How the offset of Africa/Johannesburg has changed since 1970

Read on 1 January and 1 July of each year, which is the cheapest pair of samples that shows both the winter offset and whether the clocks moved that summer. Nothing has changed: Africa/Johannesburg has been on the same pair of readings for all 57 years sampled. A rule change that began and ended between July and the following January is invisible to this sampling, so the table is a shape rather than a complete edit history.

No summer shift appears in any year sampled, so a piece of software that treats Africa/Johannesburg as a fixed offset happens to be right, and is right by luck rather than by design: the same assumption applied to a neighbouring zone breaks twice a year.

Countries and regions that use Africa/Johannesburg

One country uses Africa/Johannesburg: South Africa, which keeps this as its only time zone and has a population of about 60,410,000.

Cities in the Africa/Johannesburg time zone

The 75 cities this site covers inside Africa/Johannesburg, each with a live clock and today's sunrise and sunset worked out from its own coordinate. They share an identifier, so they share a clock reading to the minute, and they do not share a sunrise: that is set by latitude and longitude.

The sun against the clock in Africa/Johannesburg

Worked out for Johannesburg, South Africa, the city this site covers inside the zone, at 26.20 degrees south, 28.05 degrees east. The sun rises at 5:53 am and sets at 6:06 pm, giving 12 hours 12 minutes of daylight. Solar noon, the moment the sun is highest, falls at 11:59 am, which is 1 minutes before clock noon.

That gap is the whole argument about where zone lines belong, in one number. It is made of three things: Johannesburg, South Africa sitting 2.0 degrees west of the UTC+2 meridian, the equation of time, which today runs 8.6 minutes ahead of mean time, and no daylight saving at all, because this zone does not use it. Full sunrise and sunset times for Johannesburg.

Convert Africa/Johannesburg to another time zone

Africa/Johannesburg is one of the zones the converter publishes under its own name, as SAST, so these pages convert it directly rather than by matching an offset.

Questions about Africa/Johannesburg

What time is it in Africa/Johannesburg right now?

4:17 pm on Saturday, September 26, 2026, as this page was served. The clock at the top of the page ticks on from there.

What is the UTC offset of Africa/Johannesburg?

UTC+2 at this instant, on every day of the year.

Does Africa/Johannesburg observe daylight saving time?

No. It stays at UTC+2 all year.

What is the abbreviation for Africa/Johannesburg?

SAST at this instant. It does not change, because the offset does not.

Which countries use Africa/Johannesburg?

South Africa.

Why store Africa/Johannesburg instead of UTC+2?

Because the offset is an output and the identifier is the input. This zone has one offset today and no guarantee of keeping it, and 49 other zones share its current reading while carrying different rules. A record storing UTC+2 cannot tell them apart; a record storing Africa/Johannesburg keeps working through every future rule change.

Other time zones in Africa

Where else to look