Find a meeting time that works across time zones. Free timezone meeting planner and world clock: overlap windows, 200+ zones, calendar export.
This timezone meeting planner finds the hours that actually work for everyone on a distributed team. Add the cities your colleagues are in, and the planner scans the next 48 hours, compares each location’s working hours, and lists the concrete slots where all of them are inside business hours at the same time. Alongside the planner, the page runs a live world clock for any combination of more than 200 time zones, a UTC and local time converter, a draggable time slider, and a visual overlap chart. Everything runs in your browser and your setup is remembered locally—no account, no signup.
The problem an international meeting planner solves is deceptively awkward. Two zones you can do in your head. Four zones spanning San Francisco, London, Bangalore, and Sydney is a puzzle, especially once daylight saving shifts one of them by an hour and someone’s working day starts at 08:00 rather than 09:00. This tool does the arithmetic and shows you the answer as a ranked list of slots, with the local time each participant would see.
Add at least two time zones and open the Meeting Planner. It walks the next 48 hours hour by hour, converts each candidate moment into every selected zone, and checks that moment against each zone’s working hours—9am to 5pm by default. Slots where every participant is inside their working day are marked as good; slots where somebody would be stretched are shown separately, so you can decide whether an early start is acceptable rather than having the tool silently discard the option.
Each slot lists the local date and time for every zone in the group, which is what you paste into an invite. When you pick one, the export control writes the meeting straight to your calendar: download an .ics file for Outlook, Apple Calendar, or any standards-compliant client, or open a pre-filled Google Calendar event in a new tab. The default event length is 60 minutes.
Assuming 9-to-5 everywhere is the flaw in most meeting planner tools. Working days genuinely differ: a Bangalore team may run 10:00–19:00, a Berlin team 08:00–16:00, and a support rota may not resemble either. The custom working hours editor lets you set a start and end hour for each time zone individually, with a default applied to the rest. The overlap search and the overlap chart both respect those per-zone settings, so the slots you get back reflect the team you actually have.
If you repeatedly plan for the same people, save the group as a team profile. Profiles store the set of zones and their working hours in your browser’s local storage, so switching between an engineering standup group and a customer call group is one click rather than a re-entry of six cities.
The overlap view renders each time zone as a horizontal 24-hour bar with its working window shaded, all aligned to a common UTC axis. The columns where every bar is shaded are your overlap windows, visible at a glance. This is the view to screenshot and drop into a planning document when you need to argue that a genuinely shared hour does or does not exist.
For teams spread more than about ten hours apart it often shows the uncomfortable truth: there is no window where everybody is inside normal hours, and the honest options are rotating the inconvenience or moving to asynchronous updates. Seeing that as a picture ends the argument faster than a spreadsheet does.
The Clocks tab shows every zone you have added as a card with both an analog face and a digital readout, updating live. You can switch between 12-hour and 24-hour display, show or hide seconds, pin the zones you care about most, mark favourites, and let the grid auto-size to your window or fix the column count yourself. Region filters load whole continents at once—North America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, Africa—or every zone in the database if you want a full world clock wall.
The Converter tab handles the direct question: given a specific date and time in one zone, what is it everywhere else? Enter 15:00 in New York and read off London, Frankfurt, Dubai, Singapore, and Sydney at once. The Time Slider does the same thing interactively—drag it and watch every clock move together, which is the quickest way to answer “if we move it two hours earlier, who does that hurt?”
The Send My Time dialog produces a ready-to-paste plain-text snippet listing a chosen moment in the zones you tick, so you can drop it into Slack or an email without reformatting. It also copies a link that restores the same view for the recipient.
The abbreviations people search for map onto IANA zones that shift with daylight saving. The tool tracks those transitions automatically; the table below shows the standard-time relationships to UTC.
| Abbreviation | IANA zone | Standard offset | Daylight offset |
|---|---|---|---|
| PST / PDT | America/Los_Angeles | UTC−8 | UTC−7 |
| MST / MDT | America/Denver | UTC−7 | UTC−6 |
| CST / CDT | America/Chicago | UTC−6 | UTC−5 |
| EST / EDT | America/New_York | UTC−5 | UTC−4 |
| GMT / BST | Europe/London | UTC+0 | UTC+1 |
| CET / CEST | Europe/Berlin | UTC+1 | UTC+2 |
| IST | Asia/Kolkata | UTC+5:30 | no DST |
| SGT | Asia/Singapore | UTC+8 | no DST |
| JST | Asia/Tokyo | UTC+9 | no DST |
| AEST / AEDT | Australia/Sydney | UTC+10 | UTC+11 |
Note the half-hour and quarter-hour offsets that trip up manual calculation: India is UTC+5:30, Nepal is UTC+5:45, and parts of Australia sit at UTC+9:30. Because the tool converts through the IANA database rather than through fixed numeric offsets, those are handled correctly without you thinking about them.
Most cross-timezone scheduling mistakes happen in the two or three weeks a year when regions change clocks on different dates. North America switches in mid-March and early November; Europe switches at the end of March and end of October; the southern hemisphere moves in the opposite direction; and much of Asia, including India, Singapore, and Japan, does not observe daylight saving at all. During those gap weeks the offset between New York and London is four hours instead of the usual five, and a recurring meeting silently moves for half the participants.
The tool surfaces a DST alert when a selected zone has a transition approaching, so you can see the change before it breaks a standing invite rather than after. When you export to calendar, the event is anchored to an absolute moment, which is the behaviour you want—every attendee’s client renders it in their own zone.
.ics download or straight into Google Calendar, or use Send My Time to copy a text summary for chat.Add every participant’s time zone, adjust working hours if they differ from 9am–5pm, then run the Meeting Planner. It scans the next 48 hours and lists every slot where all locations are simultaneously inside business hours, showing the local time each person would see.
The database covers more than 200 zones with city and abbreviation search, and there is no fixed limit on how many you display at once. Region filters can load an entire continent, or every zone, in one action.
Yes. Conversions go through IANA time zone rules rather than fixed offsets, so DST transitions, half-hour offsets such as India’s UTC+5:30, and zones with no DST are all handled correctly. An alert banner warns you when a selected zone has a transition coming up.
Yes. Working hours are configurable per time zone with a default for the rest, and both the meeting search and the overlap chart use those per-zone values.
Yes. Any slot can be exported as a standard .ics file for Outlook or Apple Calendar, or opened as a pre-filled Google Calendar event. The default duration is 60 minutes.
The planner will show the closest slots with their quality marked rather than returning nothing, so you can see who would be stretched and by how much. The overlap chart makes the gap visible, which usually points toward rotating the awkward slot or moving that update to asynchronous.
Yes, in your browser’s local storage. Your clocks, favourites, working hours, team profiles, and display preferences persist between visits on the same device. Nothing is sent to a server and no account is required.
The Send My Time dialog generates a plain-text snippet listing a chosen moment in the zones you select, ready to paste into Slack or email, and copies a link that reproduces your view.
Yes, from settings, along with toggling seconds, choosing analog or digital clock faces, fixing the grid column count, and switching between light and dark themes.
The time duration calculator measures the span between two dates or times, the Unix timestamp converter translates epoch values to human dates, and the full developer tools collection covers related scheduling utilities.
Three tools in one for distributed teams and international scheduling.
View live clocks for 38 time zones across 9 regions. Add cities, star favorites, filter by region, and share your setup. Each clock shows local time, UTC offset, and whether it is currently business hours.
Drag the slider to any time in your day and instantly see what time it is in every other zone. Color-coded rows show who is in business hours (green), early or late (yellow), or asleep (gray). A mini 24-hour bar per zone shows the business-hours window at a glance.
Pick a source timezone, date, and time — the result auto-updates as you change any field. Defaults to your local timezone so you can quickly check what time a meeting would be for a colleague abroad.
North America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, South America, Africa, Middle East, plus UTC. Covers PST, EST, CST, MST, GMT, BST, CET, IST, JST, AEST, and 28 more abbreviations.
Mental time zone math is unreliable — DST rules differ by country, half-hour and 45-minute offsets exist (India: UTC+5:30, Nepal: UTC+5:45, parts of Australia: UTC+8:45), and a single fence-post error means someone joins an hour early or misses the meeting entirely. A meeting planner shows every participant's local time simultaneously so you can spot the overlap visually and avoid the back-and-forth of "wait, is that 3pm my time or yours?"
For recurring meetings across many time zones, the planner also helps you rotate the inconvenience — pick a 6am slot in one region this month, then shift the burden next month so the same team isn't always the one waking up early.
Timezones divide the Earth into 24 regions with standardized local times, roughly following 15-degree longitude bands. They enable coordinated global activities while maintaining local solar alignment. Critical for: scheduling international meetings, coordinating software releases, logging events correctly, managing SLAs across regions, and avoiding business communication errors. Many countries observe DST (Daylight Saving Time), complicating calculations further.
UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) is the primary time standard used globally, based on atomic clocks. GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) is a timezone (UTC+0) tied to solar time at Greenwich, UK. While often used interchangeably, UTC is more precise. All timezones express offset from UTC (e.g., EST is UTC-5, JST is UTC+9). Always store timestamps in UTC and convert to local time for display.
Store all timestamps in UTC in databases and logs. Use timezone-aware libraries (moment-timezone, date-fns-tz, Python pytz, Java ZonedDateTime) instead of manual offsets. Never store local times without timezone context. Account for DST transitions. Use IANA timezone identifiers (America/New_York) not abbreviations (EST) which are ambiguous. Test edge cases: DST transitions, leap seconds, historical timezone changes.
DST shifts clocks forward (spring) and backward (fall) to extend evening daylight. Not all countries observe DST; those that do change on different dates. This creates scheduling complexity: a weekly meeting at "10 AM EST" will shift relative to regions without DST. Solutions: schedule in UTC, use recurring meeting tools that handle DST, or specify "floating" times that adjust with local clocks.
Identify all participants' timezones, find overlapping business hours (typically 9 AM-6 PM local). Tools like World Time Buddy help visualize overlaps. Be fair—rotate meeting times if one region always accommodates. Document meetings in UTC and local times. Send calendar invites with timezone data (ICS format handles this). Consider asynchronous collaboration for extreme time differences, reducing synchronous meeting burden.
Assuming everyone follows your DST schedule, using ambiguous abbreviations (CST could mean Central Standard Time or China Standard Time), forgetting some regions have 30/45-minute offsets (India UTC+5:30, Nepal UTC+5:45), not testing DST transition periods, hardcoding timezone logic instead of using libraries, and displaying times without timezone context. Always clarify timezone and consider using 24-hour format for clarity.
Timezones change: countries adjust offsets, DST rules evolve, regions rename zones. The IANA Time Zone Database tracks these changes. When displaying historical data, use the timezone rules that were active at that time. Modern libraries with updated IANA data handle this automatically. Regularly update timezone databases in applications—outdated data causes incorrect historical and future time conversions.
Use ISO 8601 format (2025-01-30T14:30:00Z for UTC, 2025-01-30T14:30:00-05:00 for local with offset). Always include timezone information. Consider 24-hour format to avoid AM/PM confusion. Display both local time and UTC for clarity in global contexts. In user interfaces, detect user timezone automatically but allow override. For scheduling, show times in recipient's timezone: "3 PM your time (9 PM UTC)".