What time is it in another country?
The method takes ten seconds and works for anywhere — including the countries whose offsets are not whole hours and the ones that never change their clocks.
The short answer
Take the country's UTC offset and apply it to the current UTC time. UTC is currently —.
So a country at UTC+9 is nine hours later than that figure; one at UTC−5 is five hours earlier. Roll over the date if you pass midnight in either direction.
Common offsets
| Country / city | Offset now |
|---|---|
| United Kingdom | UTC+1 summer · UTC+0 winter |
| Germany, France, Spain, Italy | UTC+2 summer · UTC+1 winter |
| New York | UTC−4 summer · UTC−5 winter |
| Los Angeles | UTC−7 summer · UTC−8 winter |
| India | UTC+5:30 year-round |
| China | UTC+8 year-round |
| Japan | UTC+9 year-round |
| Singapore | UTC+8 year-round |
| UAE | UTC+4 year-round |
| South Africa | UTC+2 year-round |
| Brazil (São Paulo) | UTC−3 year-round |
| Sydney | UTC+11 / UTC+10 |
The four things that trip people up
Not every offset is a whole hour. India is UTC+5:30. Nepal is UTC+5:45. Iran is UTC+3:30 and Myanmar UTC+6:30. Rounding these to the nearest hour is wrong by 30 or 45 minutes — enough to miss a meeting.
Some countries change their clocks and some do not. If you memorised an offset in January it may be an hour out in July — or it may not, depending on the country. About half the entries above never move.
Large countries have several zones. The US has six including Alaska and Hawaii; Russia has eleven; Australia has three (five in summer, because only some states change). "What time is it in Russia?" has no single answer. China is the famous exception — one zone for the whole country.
The date may differ, not just the hour. Anything more than about eight hours away is frequently on a different calendar day. That is what causes birthday messages to arrive late.
The habit that avoids all four
Do not memorise offsets. Look the city up, or keep the cities you care about somewhere you can glance at.
Offsets are a property of a date and a place together, which is exactly the sort of thing worth delegating to a database that already encodes every rule.
Writing it for someone else
Name the city rather than an abbreviation:
"Let's say 15:00 Berlin — that's 09:00 for you in New York."
Two local times, no abbreviations, no arithmetic required by the reader. It is correct on any date, including inside the weeks when the US and Europe are briefly out of step.
Related: What time zone am I in? · Time in different countries, compared
Timezone: World Clock Widget
A world clock, converter and live day/night map for iPhone — 325 cities, offline, no account.
Figures on this page are computed from the IANA time zone database. Last generated 2026-08-18.