World time zone map
Thirty-eight offsets across twenty-six hours, and the most informative parts of the map are the places where the pattern breaks.
The short answer
The world uses 38 distinct UTC offsets spanning 26 hours — from UTC−12 to UTC+14 — across a 24-hour day.
The extra two hours exist because several Pacific nations chose offsets past ±12 to share a calendar date with their trading partners.
What the map shows at a glance
The bands are not equal. Some cover a few hundred kilometres, some cover thousands. Width is a political outcome, not a geographic one.
The land is not evenly distributed. UTC+8 covers an enormous population — China, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Western Australia. Several Pacific offsets cover almost nobody.
Africa is unusually simple. Most of the continent sits in four zones with almost no daylight saving, so the map there is close to what a purely geometric system would produce.
The anomalies worth knowing
| Place | The anomaly |
|---|---|
| China | One zone, UTC+8, for ~five hours of longitude |
| India | One zone at UTC+5:30, wide enough for two |
| Nepal | UTC+5:45 — 15 minutes from India, deliberately |
| Spain | UTC+1 at Britain's longitude |
| Russia | Eleven zones, UTC+3 to UTC+12 |
| Kiribati | UTC+14, first into each new day |
| Chatham Islands | UTC+13:45 — a 45-minute offset with its own DST |
| Australia | Three zones, five distinct times in summer |
The date line is the strangest feature
Running roughly along 180°, but zigzagging substantially — around Kiribati, around the Aleutians, around Samoa.
It has no legal status. No treaty defines it and no body administers it. It is simply where the offsets countries have chosen for themselves happen to meet, and it moves whenever a country decides to switch sides. Samoa did exactly that in 2011, skipping 30 December entirely.
See the international date line.
Daylight saving makes the map seasonal
A world time zone map is usually drawn for standard time. For about eight months of the year, large parts of it are an hour out.
The observing regions are concentrated in Europe, North America, and pockets of the southern hemisphere. Most of the map — by area and by population — does not change at all, which is worth remembering when a colleague's offset seems to have moved and yours did not.
Reading it for work
The genuinely useful skill is not memorising offsets. It is knowing which of your counterparts are in observing regions and which are not, because that tells you whose relationship with you will drift twice a year and whose will not.
Related: Time zone map · UTC offsets: the full list
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.