Time Zone Converter Instantly

Key Features and Benefits

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  IANA Time Zone Database Support — The converter uses the full IANA database with over 400 time zone identifiers. You select zones by region and city, not by abbreviation. This eliminates ambiguity and ensures accuracy for every location on Earth, including territories with unusual offsets like Chatham Islands (UTC+12:45) and Marquesas Islands (UTC-9:30). The database is updated multiple times per year to reflect legislative changes.
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  Automatic DST Adjustment — When you convert a time that falls within a DST transition period, the tool automatically applies the correct offset. If you convert 2:30 AM on the second Sunday of March in America/New_York, the tool recognizes that this time does not exist -- clocks skip from 2:00 to 3:00. It handles the ambiguous hour in November when 1:30 AM occurs twice. These edge cases cause bugs in production systems regularly, and a good converter handles them transparently.
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  ISO 8601 Format Output — The converter produces dates in ISO 8601 format with timezone offset: 2026-02-20T14:30:00-05:00 for Eastern Standard Time, or 2026-02-20T19:30:00Z for UTC (the Z suffix denotes Zulu time, which is UTC). This format is unambiguous, sortable as a string, and understood by every programming language and database. Using ISO 8601 consistently across your systems prevents the parsing bugs that arise from locale-specific date formats like MM/DD/YYYY versus DD/MM/YYYY.
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  Multi-Zone Comparison View — See the same moment in time displayed across multiple zones simultaneously. This is invaluable for scheduling meetings with participants in different cities. You can see at a glance that 3 PM in San Francisco is 6 PM in New York, 11 PM in London, and 8 AM the next day in Tokyo. The visual layout makes it easy to find a time slot that falls within business hours for all participants without doing the mental arithmetic yourself.
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  UTC Offset Display — Each time zone shows its current UTC offset, which changes when DST transitions occur. America/New_York is UTC-5 during standard time and UTC-4 during daylight saving time. Seeing the raw offset helps you understand the relationship between zones and catch mistakes. If you expect a 3-hour difference between New York and Los Angeles but the converter shows 2 hours, that might indicate one zone has transitioned to DST while the other has not yet (though in practice US zones all transition on the same day).
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  Historical Date Support — Time zone rules have changed frequently throughout history. Before 1883, US cities set their own local time based on solar noon. China had five time zones until 1949. Russia has reorganized its zones multiple times, most recently in 2014. The converter handles historical dates correctly by applying the rules that were in effect at that specific point in time. This matters for applications that process historical records, financial data with timestamps, or legal documents where the exact local time is legally significant.

How to Convert Time Zones

1. 1

   Enter the Source Date and Time

   Input the date and time you want to convert. Be specific about whether you mean AM or PM if using 12-hour format, or use 24-hour format to avoid ambiguity. If the time is coming from a system log, API response, or database record, check whether it includes a timezone indicator. A timestamp ending in Z is UTC. One ending in +05:30 is already offset from UTC. A timestamp with no timezone information is ambiguous -- you need to know what zone the system that produced it was operating in.

2. 2

   Select the Source Time Zone

   Choose the time zone that the input time is expressed in. Use the IANA identifier for your location rather than an abbreviation. If you are not sure which zone applies, search by city name. The tool will show the current UTC offset for the selected zone and whether DST is in effect. If the input time includes a UTC offset, the converter can detect the zone automatically in many cases -- though multiple IANA zones can share the same offset at any given moment.

3. 3

   Choose One or More Target Zones

   Select the time zone or zones you want to convert to. For a simple conversion -- say, converting a meeting time from Tokyo to London -- you only need one target. For multi-participant scheduling, add all relevant zones. The converter shows the converted time for each target along with the date, since crossing the International Date Line or converting late evening times can push the result into a different calendar day.

4. 4

   Review the Conversion Results

   Check the output carefully. Verify that the date is correct -- a common mistake is not realizing that 11 PM Monday in New York is already Tuesday morning in most of Asia. Look at the UTC offset shown for each zone and make sure it matches your expectations. If a result looks off by exactly one hour, DST is likely the culprit -- either the source or target zone has transitioned and your mental model has not caught up. The converter shows whether DST is active for each zone to help you diagnose these discrepancies.

5. 5

   Export or Share the Result

   Copy the converted time in ISO 8601 format for use in code, APIs, or documentation. For meeting scheduling, many converters can generate calendar event links or ICS files with the correct timezone information embedded. When sharing times with other people, always include the timezone explicitly -- saying 'the meeting is at 3 PM EST' is clear, while 'the meeting is at 3 PM' leaves the recipient guessing. Even better, share the ISO 8601 string 2026-02-20T15:00:00-05:00 and let their calendar software display it in their local zone.

Expert Tips for Time Zone Handling

Related Tools

Time zone conversion is part of the broader challenge of working across international boundaries. When you are coordinating with teams or users in different countries, you often need to convert timestamps from API responses, format JSON payloads that contain timezone data for debugging, and handle currency conversions for international transactions that are timestamped in different zones. These tools address different facets of the same problem -- operating accurately in a world where geography affects how data is represented and interpreted.