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Guide

How to Convert Times Between World Time Zones

Learn how time zones and daylight saving work, how to convert times reliably, and how to schedule across zones.

Open the Time Zone Converter

A time zone converter takes a date and time in one zone and shows the equivalent in any other zone, accounting for daylight saving automatically. It is essential for scheduling across regions.

How time zones work

The world is divided into offsets from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), typically whole hours but sometimes 30- or 45-minute steps. Zones east of UTC are ahead (UTC+), zones west are behind (UTC−). Many zones also observe daylight saving time, shifting the offset by an hour during part of the year.

Daylight saving and moving offsets

A city's offset is not constant: New York is UTC−5 in winter (EST) and UTC−4 in summer (EDT). A good converter uses the full date to look up the correct offset at that moment, so a meeting planned in July uses the summer offset automatically.

How to use the converter

  1. Enter the date and time and choose the source zone.
  2. Choose the target zone.
  3. Read the converted local time.
  4. For meetings, check each participant's zone to find an overlap.

Examples

A 09:00 meeting in New York (UTC−4 in summer) is 14:00 in London (UTC+1 in summer) and 22:00 in Sydney (UTC+10 in their winter). The same call in January shifts again because New York is then UTC−5 and Sydney is UTC+11.

When a time zone converter is useful

  • Scheduling meetings or calls across countries.
  • Planning travel and flight arrivals.
  • Coordinating live events, webinars, or launches.
  • Converting UTC timestamps from logs into local time.

Put it into practice

Use the Time Zone Converter right now — free, in your browser, no sign-up required.

Try the Time Zone Converter

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