How many time zones are there in the world?
There's a popular misconception that there are 24 time zones in the world. Nope, there are more.
Logically thinking, time zones increase by one hour, there are 24 hours in a day, so there should be 24 time zones.
But there are two more things that add more time zones to the mix: International Date Line and a few time zones that don't care about 1-hour increments and chose to increment by 30 or 45 minutes. Because why not?
There are also places in the world where time difference is more than 24 hours, with the largest difference at 26 hours. When one place is slowly winding up Saturday, the other has already started Monday!
Default noon and default midnight
There's no such thing as default noon or default midnight, but if there were, then default noon would be GMT and default midnight would be exactly at the International Date Line.
GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) passes through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, near London (at 0° longitude) while International Date Line is at the opposite side of the world (along the 180° longitude).
What creates additional time zones
- 24 "normal" time zones (1 for each hour in a full day)
- 11 "weird" time zones (who cares about full hours, let's be original and add 30 or 45 minutes instead!)
- 3 "bonus" time zones along the International Date Line (to keep some nearby territories in Pacific Island in the same day, which creates the +13 and +14-hour time zones, making 24h+ time differences possible)
List of all time zones in the world
Here's the full list of all the time zones in the world. There are 38 of them in total.
UTC is Coordinated Universal Time, which at the base point (UTC+0) is the same as GMT.
- UTC -12:00 - Pacific Islands
- UTC -11:00 - US Minor Outlying Islands, American Samoa, Niue
- UTC -10:00 - Honolulu
- UTC -9:30 - Marquesas Islands
- UTC -9:00 - Anchorage
- UTC -8:00 - Los Angeles, Vancouver, Tijuana
- UTC -7:00 - Denver, Edmonton, Ciudad Juárez
- UTC -6:00 - Mexico City, Chicago, Guatemala City, Tegucigalpa, Winnipeg, San José, San Salvador
- UTC -5:00 - New York, Toronto, Havana, Lima, Bogotá, Kingston, Quito
- UTC -4:00 - Santiago, Santo Domingo, Manaus, Caracas, La Paz, Halifax
- UTC -3:30 - St. John’s
- UTC -3:00 - São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Montevideo
- UTC -2:00 - South Sandwich Islands, South Georgia, part of Denmark
- UTC -1:00 - Cape Verde, Azores Islands, Ittoqqortoormiit (Greenland)
- UTC +0:00 - London, Dublin, Lisbon, Abidjan, Accra, Dakar
- UTC +1:00 - Berlin, Rome, Paris, Madrid, Warsaw, Lagos, Kinshasa, Algiers, Casablanca
- UTC +2:00 - Athens, Bucharest, Cairo, Helsinki, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, Khartoum, Kyiv, Riga, Sofia
- UTC +3:00 - Moscow, Istanbul, Riyadh, Baghdad, Addis Ababa, Doha
- UTC +3:30 - Iran
- UTC +4:00 - Dubai, Baku, Tbilisi, Yerevan, Samara
- UTC +4:30 - Afghanistan
- UTC +5:00 - Karachi, Tashkent, Yekaterinburg
- UTC +5:30 - Mumbai, Colombo
- UTC +5:45 - Nepal
- UTC +6:00 - Dhaka, Almaty, Omsk
- UTC +6:30 - Myanmar, Cocos (Keeling) Islands
- UTC +7:00 - Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok, Krasnoyarsk
- UTC +8:00 - Shanghai, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Perth, Manila, Makassar, Irkutsk
- UTC +8:45 - Eucla (Western Australia)
- UTC +9:00 - Tokyo, Seoul, Pyongyang, Jayapura, Chita
- UTC +9:30 - Adelaide
- UTC +10:00 - Sydney, Port Moresby, Vladivostok
- UTC +10:30 - Lord Howe Island (Australia)
- UTC +11:00 - Nouméa (New Caledonia)
- UTC +12:00 - Auckland, Suva, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky
- UTC +12:45 - Chatham Islands (New Zealand)
- UTC +13:00 - Phoenix Islands, Tokelau
- UTC +14:00 - Line Islands