About Global City Time

Why we built this site

The idea came from an ordinary frustration: arranging a call across three countries and getting it wrong, because one of them had already moved its clocks and the other two had not. Most tools answer the narrow question — the current hour — and stop there. They rarely tell you whether the offset you are looking at is the one that will still apply next month, or whether a "9 a.m. slot" lands in the middle of someone else's night.

So we built a site where each city has its own page: a live clock, the time zone in plain language, a comparison tool for any other city, and enough surrounding detail — currency, languages, dialling code, current conditions — to make the place feel concrete rather than an abstract offset. The service is free, needs no account, and works on a phone as well as a desktop.

How our clocks work

Every clock on the site is rendered in your browser from your own device clock, converted into the target city's zone using the IANA time zone database — the same reference that operating systems, programming languages, and airline systems rely on. Nothing is cached as a fixed hour on our servers, which is why the seconds keep ticking while you read the page.

Two practical consequences follow. First, daylight saving time is handled automatically: when a region shifts between standard and summer time, the rules for that shift are already in the database, and the page reflects the change on the day it happens without anyone editing anything. Second, the accuracy of what you see depends on your own device being set correctly. If your computer's clock has drifted by ten minutes, every clock on this site will be ten minutes off in exactly the same way.

We track updates to the time zone database, because governments change their rules more often than people expect — new offsets, abandoned daylight saving, redrawn zone boundaries. When a rule changes, the affected city pages follow.

Where our data comes from

• Time zones and DST rules — the IANA time zone database (tzdata), the standard reference maintained for the entire industry.
• City reference data — coordinates, country, region, currency, official languages and international dialling codes, drawn from public geographic datasets and checked against the time zone assigned to each location.
• Weather, sunrise and sunset — current conditions and daily forecasts supplied by WeatherAPI.com.
• City descriptions and guides — written and edited by our own team, not syndicated from elsewhere.

No dataset of nearly thirty thousand cities is perfect. Place names have several spellings, borders and administrative regions change, and small towns occasionally sit on the wrong side of a time zone line in public data. If you spot something wrong on a page, we would rather hear about it than not — corrections sent to our contact page are read by a person.

What you will find here

• City pages — a live local clock for cities worldwide, with time zone, UTC offset, current weather, and sunrise and sunset times.
• Time difference tool — on any city page, compare that city with another and see exactly how many hours separate them right now, daylight saving time included.
• Guides — long-form articles on how time zones actually work: UTC, daylight saving time, zone abbreviations, scheduling across continents, jet lag and travel planning, and country-by-country overviews.
• FAQ — short answers to the questions we are asked most often about the clocks, DST and data accuracy.
• Site map — a browsable index if you would rather explore than search.

Our editorial approach

Our guides are written to be read once and remembered, not to repeat the same paragraph in forty variations. Each one is drafted by someone who works through the topic, checked against primary sources such as the time zone database and official announcements from the countries concerned, and dated so you can see how current it is. Where a rule is genuinely disputed or in flux — and in this subject that happens more often than you would think — we say so rather than pretending to a certainty the sources do not support.

We revisit published guides when the underlying facts change. A country abolishing daylight saving time, or moving to a new offset, means the articles that mention it get updated rather than quietly aging.

How the site is funded

Global City Time is free to use and carries advertising. Advertising covers hosting, the weather data subscription and the time spent writing and maintaining the content. We do not sell your personal information, and we do not take payment for favourable mentions in our guides — editorial content and advertising are kept separate.

What we collect while you use the site, and how cookies and advertising technologies are involved, is set out in full in our Privacy Policy. The terms that govern use of the site are in our Terms of Service.

Who is behind Global City Time

The site is operated by K-Software, an independent software company based in Kraków, Poland. We are a small team — development, data and editorial work all happen in-house — which is why every message sent to us reaches someone who can actually do something about it.

Get in touch

Corrections, missing cities, guide suggestions, partnership enquiries or privacy requests — all of it is welcome. Our contact page explains what to include so we can help you quickly.

Contact us