Nepal is 45 minutes off, and that’s deliberate
UTC+5:45 — fifteen minutes from India, set to a mountain, and one of only three quarter-hour offsets in the world.
The short answer
Nepal is UTC+5:45 — 45 minutes past the hour, and exactly 15 minutes ahead of India's UTC+5:30.
It is set to the meridian of Mount Gaurishankar, a peak about 100 km east of Kathmandu, and it is not an accident.
Only three places do this
Quarter-hour offsets are genuinely rare:
| Offset | Where |
|---|---|
| UTC+5:45 | Nepal |
| UTC+8:45 | Eucla, Western Australia (about 200 people) |
| UTC+13:45 / UTC+12:45 | Chatham Islands, New Zealand |
Nepal is by far the largest — around 30 million people on a 45-minute offset.
Why 45 and not 30
Two answers, and both are true.
The geographic one: Nepal adopted the meridian through Mount Gaurishankar as its standard in 1986. That meridian genuinely corresponds to +5:45, so the offset reflects the country's actual longitude more closely than +5:30 would.
The political one: it is 15 minutes different from India. Nepal has never been colonised and is emphatic about its independence from its much larger neighbour. Sharing IST would have been the simpler engineering choice; the 15 minutes is a statement, and Nepalis will tell you so cheerfully.
Both readings are widely acknowledged. The mountain provides the justification; the distinction provides the motive.
What a 45-minute offset breaks
Every whole-hour assumption at once. A tool that handles India's half hour may still fail on Nepal's quarter.
Day boundaries. Midnight in Kathmandu is 23:15 in Delhi and 18:15 UTC. Anything computing "start of day" across zones has to handle a boundary that aligns with nothing.
Overlap windows. Shared-hours calculations against Nepal must scan minute boundaries. Hour-level scanning produces windows that are wrong at both ends.
Flight and meeting scheduling. A 09:00 meeting in London is 14:45 in Kathmandu — an unfamiliar-looking number that people assume is a typo.
The engineering point
Nepal is the standard test case for time zone code, and deservedly.
If a system handles Asia/Kathmandu correctly — 45-minute offset, no daylight
saving, correct day boundaries, correct overlap calculation — it is very likely
handling everything else correctly too. If it rounds Nepal to +6, it is doing
whole-hour arithmetic somewhere, and it is wrong for India as well.
Nepal does not observe daylight saving, so UTC+5:45 is correct every day of the year.
Related: Half-hour and quarter-hour time zones · Why is India 30 minutes off?
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Figures on this page are computed from the IANA time zone database. Last generated 2026-08-18.