It is 5:38 pm in Asia/Kolkata

Asia/Kolkata is the IANA identifier for the time zone of Kolkata in India. It is running at UTC+5:30 right now, abbreviated IST, and the local date is Saturday, September 26, 2026. The zone never moves its clocks.

What time is it in Asia/Kolkata right now

5:38 pm on Saturday, September 26, 2026, as this page was served, which in 24 hour form is 17:38. The clock above ticks on from there in your own browser. The offset is 5 hours and 30 minutes ahead of UTC. Half hour offsets catch out code that stores a zone as an integer number of hours, and they are the reason a UTC timestamp converted here lands on :30 or :00 depending on where it started.

1 other zone reads UTC+5:30 at this instant: Asia/Colombo. They agree on the clock now and need not agree in six months, because each one carries its own daylight saving rule.

The UTC offset of Asia/Kolkata

An offset of UTC+5:30 names the meridian 82.5 degrees east. Kolkata, India actually sits at 88.36 degrees east, which is 5.9 degrees east of it, so the sun there runs about 23 minutes ahead of 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+5:30 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 Asia/Kolkata

Asia/Kolkata does not observe daylight saving. It sits at UTC+5:30 in January and reads UTC+5:30 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 Asia/Kolkata 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 Asia/Kolkata 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: Asia/Kolkata 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 Asia/Kolkata 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 Asia/Kolkata

One country uses Asia/Kolkata: India, which keeps this as its only time zone and has a population of about 1,428,630,000.

Cities in the Asia/Kolkata time zone

The 537 cities this site covers inside Asia/Kolkata, 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 Asia/Kolkata

Worked out for Kolkata, India, the city this site covers inside the zone, at 22.57 degrees north, 88.36 degrees east. The sun rises at 5:26 am and sets at 5:29 pm, giving 12 hours 3 minutes of daylight. Solar noon, the moment the sun is highest, falls at 11:28 am, which is 32 minutes before clock noon.

That gap is the whole argument about where zone lines belong, in one number. It is made of three things: Kolkata, India sitting 5.9 degrees east of the UTC+5:30 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 Kolkata.

Convert Asia/Kolkata to another time zone

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

Questions about Asia/Kolkata

What time is it in Asia/Kolkata right now?

5:38 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 Asia/Kolkata?

UTC+5:30 at this instant, on every day of the year.

Does Asia/Kolkata observe daylight saving time?

No. It stays at UTC+5:30 all year.

What is the abbreviation for Asia/Kolkata?

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

Which countries use Asia/Kolkata?

India.

Why store Asia/Kolkata instead of UTC+5:30?

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 1 other zone shares its current reading while carrying different rules. A record storing UTC+5:30 cannot tell them apart; a record storing Asia/Kolkata keeps working through every future rule change.

Other time zones in Asia

Where else to look