The widest clock gap inside one country
When it is UTC+12 on the far side of Russia, it is UTC+2 on the near side. That is 10 hours between two places under the same government, the same passport and the same national broadcaster.
Computed at 27 September 2026 at 06:38 UTC. Read at this instant, because daylight saving moves the ends of several of these ranges. A country whose eastern edge changes clocks in March and whose western edge does not will shuffle positions twice a year.
Every country with more than one clock, widest first
| # | Country | Earliest clock | Latest clock | Gap | Zones |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Russia | UTC+2 Europe/Kaliningrad | UTC+12 Asia/Kamchatka | 10 hours | 26 |
| 2 | United States | UTC-10 Pacific/Honolulu | UTC-4 America/New_York | 6 hours | 29 |
| 3 | Canada | UTC-7 America/Creston | UTC-2:30 America/St_Johns | 4 hours 30 minutes | 23 |
| 4 | Brazil | UTC-5 America/Eirunepe | UTC-2 America/Noronha | 3 hours | 16 |
| 5 | Greenland | UTC-3 America/Thule | UTC+0 America/Danmarkshavn | 3 hours | 4 |
| 6 | Australia | UTC+8 Australia/Perth | UTC+10:30 Australia/Lord_Howe | 2 hours 30 minutes | 12 |
| 7 | Mexico | UTC-7 America/Hermosillo | UTC-5 America/Ojinaga | 2 hours | 12 |
| 8 | Indonesia | UTC+7 Asia/Jakarta | UTC+9 Asia/Jayapura | 2 hours | 4 |
| 9 | Kiribati | UTC+12 Pacific/Tarawa | UTC+14 Pacific/Kiritimati | 2 hours | 3 |
| 10 | China | UTC+6 Asia/Urumqi | UTC+8 Asia/Shanghai | 2 hours | 2 |
| 11 | French Polynesia | UTC-10 Pacific/Tahiti | UTC-9 Pacific/Gambier | 1 hour | 3 |
| 12 | Micronesia | UTC+10 Pacific/Chuuk | UTC+11 Pacific/Pohnpei | 1 hour | 3 |
| 13 | Portugal | UTC+0 Atlantic/Azores | UTC+1 Europe/Lisbon | 1 hour | 3 |
| 14 | Spain | UTC+1 Atlantic/Canary | UTC+2 Europe/Madrid | 1 hour | 3 |
How the gap was measured
For every country that carries more than one IANA zone, we asked each of its zones what offset from UTC it is reading at this exact instant, then subtracted the smallest from the largest. Nothing is looked up from a list of published time zone spans: the offsets come out of the same database your operating system uses, evaluated for right now.
Doing it live matters more here than on most pages, because several of these countries are mid-transition for part of the year. Russia does not observe daylight saving anywhere, so its span is steady. Countries whose zones change clocks on different dates, or where some zones change and others do not, genuinely widen and narrow across the year, and a stored figure would be wrong for months at a time.
The countries covered are the 243 sovereign states and inhabited territories in our catalogue, with overseas territories counted as their own entries rather than folded into the parent state. Fold France's territories back in and France would lead this table outright; we do not, because a page about Guadeloupe is not a page about Paris and the reader searching for one is not searching for the other.
What 10 hours means on the ground
Russia is wide enough that a domestic flight can land before it took off by the clock, and wide enough that a national morning news bulletin is going out to people finishing dinner. The practical consequences are constant and unglamorous: railway timetables across the whole network are published in the capital's time regardless of where the train is, television schedules are quoted for a single region and mentally adjusted everywhere else, and a nationwide phone-in has no hour at which the entire country is awake.
The second and third places, United States and Canada and Brazil, reach 6 hours and 4 hours 30 minutes and 3 hours respectively, and both get there the same way Russia does: continental width plus outlying islands or territories at one end.
The gaps that are not about width
Further down the table are countries that are not wide at all. A two hour internal gap can come from a single administrative decision rather than from geography: one region declining to follow the national clock, or an island group being left on its own offset. Those cases are more interesting than the continental ones, because the gap is a political artefact rather than an astronomical necessity, and because the people either side of the line often live within a few hours' drive of each other. The clock gap per kilometre ranking is built to find exactly those places.
Questions about this ranking
- Which country spans the most time zones internally?
- Russia, running from UTC+2 to UTC+12, a gap of 10 hours as this page was built.
- Does this include overseas territories?
- Not for the parent country. Territories with their own zones are listed as their own entries, so France's Pacific and Caribbean holdings appear separately rather than stretching metropolitan France across half the planet.
- Can a country’s internal gap change during the year?
- Yes, whenever some of its zones observe daylight saving and others do not, or when they change on different dates. That is why this page states the instant it was computed at.
- Is the widest gap also the most zones?
- No. Zone identifiers count distinct histories of rules, not distinct clocks, so the two rankings disagree. The country with the most identifiers is in second place here.