Time Zone Converter

How the conversion works

Pick a time, a source zone and a target zone, and the tool gives you the matching local time. The zones are named after cities and regions rather than offsets — Africa/Algiers, America/New_York — because a fixed offset like “UTC+1” is only true for part of the year in much of the world.

Those names come from the IANA Time Zone Database, the reference that operating systems and browsers use to work out local time. IANA maintains it and releases updates whenever a government changes a boundary, an offset or a daylight-saving rule. It is revised several times a year for exactly that reason: time zones are political decisions, and they change.

Source: IANA Time Zone Database.

Why daylight saving breaks mental arithmetic

The habit of remembering a destination as “six hours ahead” works until one of the two places changes clocks and the other does not. The gap then shifts by an hour for a few weeks, twice a year, and the countries involved do not switch on the same dates.

The complication is that daylight saving is far from universal. Much of the world does not observe it at all, and a place that does can stop: the database’s recent revisions have included jurisdictions moving to a permanent fixed offset. Choosing a zone by name rather than by offset means the rule in force on your date is applied for you.

Where this matters most for travellers is in the weeks around a transition. If you are booking a call, a transfer or a connecting service that straddles the last Sunday in March or October — common transition dates in Europe and North America, though not identical ones — convert the specific date rather than assuming the usual difference holds.

The southern hemisphere runs the other way

Daylight saving shifts clocks forward in local summer, so northern and southern hemisphere observers move in opposite directions. Between a European city and an Australian or South American one, the difference can swing by two hours across the year: once when one end changes, again when the other does. This is the single most common source of missed calls between Europe and Australia, and the reason a remembered offset is worth re-checking each time rather than once.

Practical uses on a trip

Calling home. Convert before you dial, in the direction that matters: what time is it there when it is a reasonable hour here. Getting this backwards is how people phone their family at four in the morning.

Check-in and cancellation deadlines. These are almost always expressed in the local time of the property or the departure airport, not yours. A free-cancellation deadline of “24 hours before arrival” is 24 hours before local check-in time at the destination.

Arrival planning. Converting your arrival time into local time before you book onward transport prevents the classic error of booking a transfer for the departure-side clock.

Working while travelling. If you need to overlap with colleagues, convert the edges of their working day into your local time rather than the middle. The overlap window, not the time difference, is what determines whether a schedule is workable.

Reading a destination’s clock

Every country, city and destination guide on FANOUSS shows the current local time for that place, so you can check a single destination without converting anything. The guides also note the zone name, which is what you would select here.

Related tools

If you are converting times to work out how long a journey takes, the Flight Duration Calculator does that directly — it accounts for the offset difference so you do not have to subtract two local times by hand. For the straight-line distance between two places, see the Distance Calculator. Browse destinations by region in our country guides.