What time is it in any city

Name a city and you get the time there now — with its zone, its offset, whether daylight saving is on, and when it last changed. Name a second city and it converts a moment between the two. And every answer carries the machine forms of that instant: epoch seconds, ISO 8601, ISO week, and a Discord timestamp ready to paste. Free, no account, nothing stored.

What it does, and why it is here

The time in a place is not a number, it is a rule: a base offset from UTC, plus a daylight-saving policy, plus the history of every time a government changed either. Those rules move — several countries change them each year, some with a few weeks’ notice — and they are maintained in a database the world shares rather than derived from anything.

Which is why an offset is not an answer. “UTC+1” is true of Paris in January and false in July. A three-letter abbreviation is worse: CST means at least three different things depending on the continent, and IST at least two. Only a city, or its IANA zone identifier, designates the rule unambiguously.

So the tool answers from a place, states the identifier it used, and shows the offset it produced. Then it does the two things people are usually here for: convert a specific moment between two places, and hand over the same instant in the formats software wants.

What you fill in

• City — type and pick. The coordinates and the zone come with it.
• At a given moment, optional — a wall-clock time at that city. Leave it empty to read the time now. This is the field for “the meeting is at 9 in Berlin”.
• Convert to, optional — a second city by name, or an IANA zone identifier such as Asia/Tokyo. The answer adds what that same instant reads there.

What you get back

• The local time, with the date, and whether it is the same day as yours.
• The zone — its IANA identifier, its UTC offset, its abbreviation where it has a meaningful one, and whether daylight saving is currently in effect.
• The last transition — when the clocks last changed there. The line that answers “have they moved yet this year?”, which is the question behind most one-hour mistakes.
• The same instant in the other city, when you named one — with its own zone and offset, so a meeting time can be read off directly rather than added up.
• The day at a glance — sunrise, day length and the evening’s moon at that place. Enough to know whether it is dark there before you call.
• For developers — the same instant in the forms code and tools actually use, each with a copy button:
  • Epoch seconds, for anything that speaks Unix time.
  • ISO 8601 with offset, the unambiguous written form.
  • The IANA identifier, which is what you should be storing rather than an offset.
  • UTC offset in minutes — minutes, not hours, because several zones are not on whole hours.
  • ISO week and day of year.
  • Discord timestamps, full and relative — the markup that renders in every reader’s own time zone, which is how you announce a time to people in five countries without doing the arithmetic for any of them.

What it does not do

It does not know your computer’s clock, and does not use it: the answer comes from the zone rules for the place you named, so it is the same for everyone asking.

It holds cities, not addresses or postcodes, and it will not tell you a country’s time when that country has several zones — which is exactly the ambiguity it exists to remove.

And it reads the rules as they stand. A government that changes its policy next month changes the answer next month; nothing here can predict a decision that has not been taken.

Why a city, and not an offset or an abbreviation

Two more facts worth carrying. Not every offset is a whole hour — India is at +5:30, Nepal at +5:45, parts of Australia at +8:45 — which is why the developer block gives the offset in minutes. And roughly half the world does not observe daylight saving at all, so “the difference is seven hours” is a statement with a season attached.

Questions

Is it free?

Yes. No account, no key, no limit.

Do you keep what I search for?

No. The city and moment are used to answer and then forgotten.

Is this my computer’s clock?

No. It is computed from the zone rules for the place you named, which is why two people in different countries get the same answer.

What exactly is a time zone identifier?

A name like Europe/Paris or America/New_York in the shared time zone database. It designates the whole rule — the offset, the daylight saving policy, and their history — which is what an offset or an abbreviation cannot do.

How do I convert a meeting time between two cities?

Put the first city and the wall-clock time in the top fields, and the second city in convert to. The answer reads the same instant on both clocks.

What is a Discord timestamp for?

Announcing a time to people in several countries. Paste the markup into a message and every reader sees it rendered in their own zone — nobody has to convert, and nobody converts it wrong.

Why is India half an hour off?

Because offsets are political rather than geometric. India chose +5:30, Nepal +5:45, and parts of Australia +8:45 — which is why any code storing an offset should store minutes.

What happens on the night the clocks change?

An hour is skipped or repeated. In spring a wall-clock time may not exist at all; in autumn one may happen twice. The answer names the zone and the last transition so you can see which side of the change you are on.

My town is not in the list.

Pick the nearest city in the same zone — the rule is what matters, and it is shared across the whole zone.

Sources and further reading

• The IANA time zone database — where the rules actually live.
• ISO 8601 — the written form the answer gives.
• Unix time — what the epoch seconds count.