How to schedule a meeting across time zones without mistakes

A team in London, New York and Kathmandu has very few hours when everyone is at work. Finding them by mental arithmetic works until the clocks change in one country and not another — and someone joins an hour early, or not at all.

Find the overlap step by step

1. Open the Time Zone Meeting Planner and add each city or time zone. The first one is the reference.
2. Choose the actual meeting date, and the working hours you want to respect.
3. Look for hours marked as inside working hours everywhere. Early mornings and evenings are marked separately from night, so you can see the least disruptive compromise when there is no perfect slot.
4. Select an hour to see it in every city, and copy the times into your invite.

Local times are worked out from the same time-zone rules operating systems use, so daylight saving and unusual offsets are correct for the date you choose.

Always use the real date

Countries change their clocks on different dates, and some never do. In 2026, the United States moved its clocks forward on 8 March and moves them back on 1 November; the UK and the European Union moved forward on 29 March and move back on 25 October. For a few weeks each spring and autumn, London and New York are four hours apart instead of five, and a recurring meeting moves by an hour for one side.

The southern hemisphere runs the other way. In much of Australia, clocks go forward in early October and back in early April, so the gap between Sydney and Europe changes by two hours over the year.

Half-hour and quarter-hour zones

Not every zone is a whole number of hours from UTC. India is UTC+5:30 and Nepal UTC+5:45, so 9:00 in London in winter is 14:30 in Delhi and 14:45 in Kathmandu. Mental arithmetic slips most often with these.

Write invites nobody can misread

• Send a calendar invite rather than a time in a message; calendar apps convert to each person's own zone.
• In text, give the time in every city — in winter, for example, “14:00 London / 09:00 New York / 19:45 Kathmandu”.
• Use the 24-hour clock or add am and pm, never neither.
• Include the date in every city when the meeting crosses midnight somewhere.

Be fair over time

When no hour suits everyone, the same people should not always take the 7:00 or 21:00 slot. Rotating the inconvenient time between regions, or recording meetings for those who cannot attend live, keeps a distributed team working well.

Common pairs

• London and New York: on most weekdays, 14:00–17:00 in London is 09:00–12:00 in New York.
• Europe and India: mornings in Europe overlap with afternoons in India.
• US west coast and Asia: late afternoon in California is early morning the next day in much of Asia — watch the date.

Timestamps in systems

In software and logs, times are best stored in UTC and converted for display. To read a Unix timestamp in UTC and your own zone, use the Timestamp Converter; for plain durations, the Time Converter.