World Clock, Current Time in Cities Around the World
Check the current time in cities around the world. Live world clock with time zones, UTC offsets, automatic DST and day/night indicators in your browser.
Loading World Clock, Current Time in Cities Around the World… If nothing happens, please enable JavaScript.
A world clock answers a deceptively simple question: what time is it right now somewhere else? This tool shows the current time in as many cities as you like, side by side, updating live to the second. Each clock card displays the city name, the local date, the exact time in that location, the UTC offset, the difference in hours compared with your own local time, and a day/night indicator so you can tell at a glance whether it is a reasonable hour to call someone there. Your own time zone is detected automatically and pinned as the local reference, and you can add, remove and reorder cities freely.
Frequently asked questions
How accurate is this world clock?
Does it handle daylight saving time automatically?
How many cities can I add?
Is my city list saved?
Can I switch between 12-hour and 24-hour time?
What does the UTC offset and the hour difference mean?
Why can't I find my city in the search?
What does the day/night indicator mean?
Does the world clock work offline?
Is this world clock free to use?
About World Clock, Current Time in Cities Around the World
Behind every world clock sits the system of time zones and UTC offsets. Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is the global reference, and every zone is defined as an offset from it, such as UTC+1 for Central Europe or UTC-5 for New York in winter. Some offsets are not whole hours at all: India runs on UTC+5:30 and Nepal on UTC+5:45. The genuinely hard part is daylight saving time, because countries switch on different dates, some regions within a country opt out, and the rules change from year to year. This tool does not guess any of that. It relies on the IANA time zone database built into your browser through the Intl API, the same continuously maintained dataset used by operating systems and servers worldwide, so DST transitions and historical rule changes are applied automatically and correctly.
The practical uses are everywhere once you work across borders. Remote and distributed teams use a world clock to find meeting slots that do not land at 3 a.m. for half the participants. Freelancers and support teams check whether a client in another country is inside business hours before picking up the phone. Travellers keep an eye on the time back home while adjusting to a new zone, and families spread across continents use it to know when a call will be welcome rather than an alarm clock. Traders and remote workers watching markets or deployments in other regions keep the relevant cities pinned permanently. Because the tool shows the hour difference explicitly (for example +9h or -5h, including half-hour zones like +5.5h), converting a proposed meeting time in your head becomes trivial.
Everything here runs locally in your browser. The clocks are driven by your device's own clock combined with the browser's time zone database, so no network request is made to display the time, and the tool keeps working offline once the page is loaded. Your list of cities and your 12/24-hour preference are saved in your browser's local storage on your device only; nothing is uploaded, no account is needed, and the tool is completely free. Set up your cities once and they will be waiting, ticking, the next time you open the page.
Railway Chaos, One Meridian, and a Database Run by Volunteers
Before time zones existed, every town simply set its clocks by the sun, so noon in one city was a few minutes different from noon in the next. This was harmless until railways made it dangerous: by the mid-1800s a traveller crossing the United States could pass through dozens of local times, and stations kept multiple clocks for different railway companies. Timetables were unreadable and near-collisions were blamed on time confusion. The railways acted first, and in November 1883 the North American rail companies adopted a system of standard one-hour zones, with most cities quickly falling in line.
The idea of extending this to the whole planet is closely associated with Sandford Fleming, a Scottish-born Canadian railway engineer who, after missing a train in Ireland in 1876 because of an ambiguous timetable, began campaigning for a single worldwide system of 24 hourly zones. His advocacy helped bring about the International Meridian Conference, held in Washington in October 1884, where delegates from 25 nations voted to adopt the meridian passing through the Greenwich observatory as the world's prime meridian and the basis for a universal day. Greenwich Mean Time became the global reference, later refined into today's Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which is kept by an ensemble of atomic clocks. Politics and geography, however, kept the map untidy: India settled on UTC+5:30, Nepal chose UTC+5:45 to align noon with a mountain peak near Kathmandu, and China spans five geographical zones but runs the whole country on a single Beijing time.
Keeping track of all these rules, including every DST change a parliament decides on short notice, is the job of the IANA time zone database, often called the tz database. It began in the 1980s as a volunteer project by Arthur David Olson and was later coordinated for decades by Paul Eggert, with contributors around the world sending in updates whenever a government tweaks its clocks. Zone names like Europe/Lisbon or Asia/Tokyo come directly from this database, and it also records history: it can tell you what the legal time was in a given city on a date decades ago. Virtually every operating system, programming language and browser ships this database, which is why a web page like this one can show correct, DST-aware time for the whole planet without contacting any server.