My Time Zone

Where the time zone comes from

Your device keeps a time zone setting, usually updated automatically from the mobile network or your location. Browsers share it with web pages, so we can show it without asking for permission. The name looks like America/Chicago or Europe/Paris. That's the official identifier from the IANA time zone database, which records every zone's offsets and clock changes.

The UTC offset shows how far your clock is ahead of or behind Coordinated Universal Time right now. It changes during the year if your zone uses daylight saving time.

When the time zone is wrong

• Automatic time zone is off. After a trip, a device can keep the old zone. On iPhone, turn on Settings → General → Date & Time → Set Automatically; on Android and computers, turn on automatic time zone in date and time settings. Then reload this page, which reads the zone when it loads.
• Near a time zone border, the phone network may assign the neighboring zone. It happens along some US state lines and on national borders.
• A VPN doesn't change it directly. The zone here comes from the device, not from your IP address. Websites that guess from your IP may show something else.
• Privacy browsers can hide it. Tor Browser, for example, reports UTC to every website. Then you'll see UTC+00:00 and a local time that may not match your clock.
• Unusual offsets are real. India uses UTC+05:30 and Nepal UTC+05:45, and Lord Howe Island in Australia moves its clocks by only 30 minutes.

Tap Compare with my location to check: it looks up the time zone at your position and warns you if your device is set differently. It needs location access, and your coordinates are sent only for the lookup and not stored by us.

Different names don't always mean different clocks. The database also splits zones by past rules, so America/Detroit and America/New_York share today's time. The page tells you when that's the case.

Daylight saving time

The page shows whether daylight saving time is in effect. It also shows the date of the next clock change for your zone, with the offsets before and after.

In the US, clocks go forward at 2:00 a.m. local time on the second Sunday in March and back on the first Sunday in November. Hawaii and most of Arizona stay on standard time all year, so there the page says your time zone doesn't change clocks.

In the European Union, clocks change on the last Sundays of March and October. Many countries, including most of Asia and Africa, don't change clocks at all.