Time zone map of the world – the time now in every zone

A time zone map answers questions a list of offsets cannot: why the clocks in western China read the same as in Shanghai, why Spain shares a time with Poland, and where you cross from one hour into the next on a road trip through Kentucky or Kazakhstan. This map draws the real zones, not neat 15° strips: 419 areas from the IANA time zone database, each with its own history of clock changes, built from country and province borders in OpenStreetMap. It opens on the whole world as it is this minute. Each zone is filled by its offset from UTC, the labels give the local time in about 35 large cities, dark lines mark where the clock jumps, and the shading shows where it is night. The list beside the map gives the time at every UTC offset in use, from UTC−11 to UTC+14, and a click on an offset picks out its zones. Switch the colours to daylight saving time to see who is on summer time today, who changes the clocks at another time of year and who never does. Move the map to another date and time, for example mid-January against mid-July, to see the clocks of the north and the south swap, and download what you see as a PNG for a slide or a classroom.

How to use it

1. Open the page; the map shows every time zone and the time in major cities right now.
2. Choose "Colour the zones by" UTC offset or daylight saving time, and use the region buttons to zoom to North America, Europe, Asia or Australia.
3. Set another date and time, or press 15 January or 15 July, to see the map at that moment; Now returns to the live map.
4. Click a zone for its name, local time and next clock change, then download the map as PNG or copy the share link.

How accurate is it?

Real zone borders, simplified with care

The zones come from timezone-boundary-builder, which builds each IANA zone from OpenStreetMap borders and includes territorial waters. For a map of the whole world they are reduced to about 4 % of their points; on 40,000 random points on land the simplified map gave the same zone as the full data 99.96 % of the time, and every difference lay within 0.7 km of a border. Open water beyond 12 nautical miles has no legal time and is left blank; ships use nautical zones there.

The clocks are your browser's

GeoDrafter stores no offsets. The time, the UTC offset and the summer time rules of each zone come from the IANA tz database built into your browser, read through the standard Intl interface, so the map is right for past and future dates as far as the rules are known when your browser was last updated. A country that changes its rules at short notice can be wrong for a few weeks on devices that have not been updated.

How daylight saving time is counted

In the daylight saving view a zone counts as changing its clocks when its offset on 15 January differs from its offset on 15 July of the same year, and as on summer time when its offset is above the smaller of the two. In 2026 that is 128 of the 419 zones: 115 in the northern hemisphere, which are on summer time in July, and 13 in the south, which are on it in January. Morocco's one-month change for Ramadan is not counted, because it falls between the two dates.

Good to know

Zones are not 15° strips

In theory a time zone is 15° of longitude wide, one hour of the earth's turn. In practice zones follow borders: China spans five geographical zones and keeps one clock, France, Spain and Belgium use Central European Time although they lie mostly west of Greenwich, and Kiribati moved its eastern islands to UTC+14 so that the whole country shares a date. The map therefore shows the solar time and the clock time disagreeing by an hour or more in many places.

Not every offset is a whole hour

India is 5 hours 30 minutes ahead of UTC, Nepal 5 hours 45 minutes, the Chatham Islands 12 hours 45 minutes in their winter, and Newfoundland 3 hours 30 minutes behind. Eleven offsets on the half or quarter hour are in use; the map gives them a colour of their own so they are easy to spot.

Same offset, different zone

Two neighbouring areas can show the same time today and still be different zones, because one changes its clocks and the other does not, as with Arizona and the rest of Mountain Time in winter. Grey lines mark such borders, and dark lines mark borders where the clock differs at the moment shown. Pick a date in summer and some grey lines turn dark.