Meeting time planner

How do I find a meeting time that works across time zones?

Pick the day, choose the cities and enter the working hours you can accept. The page converts each hour of the first city's day into the local time of everyone else and marks the hours when all of them are inside working hours. Those shared hours are your candidate times; the table also shows the next best hours when nobody overlaps.

What if no hours overlap?

It happens: and with three cities spread around the globe it is common. The result then tells you the hour when the most people are at work. Either widen the working hours (for instance 8:00 to 18:00), or rotate the inconvenient time between teams so that nobody is always the one meeting at night.

How does daylight saving time change the answer?

It shifts the gap between cities twice a year, and not on the same days everywhere. In 2026 the United States moves to daylight time on March 8 and back on November 1; the European Union moves on March 29 and October 25. Between those dates the gap between New York and London is 4 hours instead of 5, which gives 4 shared working hours on March 18 instead of 3 on July 1. The result shows a warning when a city changes its clocks within a week of your date.

When does daylight saving time start in the US and the EU?

In the United States, on the second Sunday of March at 2:00 a.m. local time, ending on the first Sunday of November (15 U.S.C. 260a); Arizona, except the Navajo Nation, and Hawaii do not change their clocks. In the European Union, on the last Sunday of March and the last Sunday of October, at 01:00 UTC for all member states (Directive 2000/84/EC). The southern hemisphere runs the other way: Sydney is on daylight time in January.

Why is only a fixed set of cities offered?

The page offers 34 major time zones that cover where most meetings are held. Many other places share a zone with one of them: Chicago stands for the US Central zone, Paris for most of central Europe, Mumbai for all of India. If your city is not listed, choose the city that follows the same clock, and check the offset shown in the result.

Are the results accurate for future dates?

They come from the time zone database that your browser carries, which is the IANA tz database, so they are as current as your device's last update. If a government changes its daylight saving rules after your device was updated, dates after the change can be wrong, so for a meeting months ahead of an announced rule change, confirm the time in your calendar app.

How is this different from the time zone converter?

The time zone converter takes one date and time in one place and gives you the same moment elsewhere. This planner works the other way round: it takes several places and a working day and finds the window where everyone is on the clock.

How the planner works

For each whole hour of the first city's day, the page finds the exact moment in universal time and asks the browser's time zone database for the local time in every other city on that moment. A city is 'at work' when its local time falls from the start of your working hours up to, but not including, the end. A row counts as shared when every city is at work. Because each conversion is made for the actual moment, daylight saving time, half-hour offsets (India is UTC+5:30) and dates that fall on a different calendar day are all handled by the database, not by a fixed list of offsets.

Worked example

A team in New York and London meets between 9:00 and 17:00 local time. On July 1, 2026 New York is on UTC−4 and London on UTC+1, a 5-hour gap. New York's 9:00 to 12:00 is London's 14:00 to 17:00, so the shared window is 9:00 AM–12:00 PM in New York: 3 hours. On January 14 the gap is 5 hours and the window is 9:00 AM–12:00 PM: 3 hours. On March 18 the US has changed its clocks and Britain has not, so New York is on UTC−4, the gap is 4 hours and the window is 9:00 AM–1:00 PM: 4 hours. Add Mumbai or Delhi (UTC+5:30) and the answer on July 1 becomes 0 shared hours; the best you can do is 2 of the 3 people at work. At 9:00 AM New York time it is 2:00 PM in London and 6:30 PM in India, so New York and London are at work (2 of 3) and India is past closing time. For Los Angeles and Sydney on July 1 the gap is 17 hours; in January, when Sydney is on daylight time and Los Angeles on standard time, it is 19.

Common mistakes

Assuming the gap between two cities is constant. It changes on the days when one of them moves its clocks and the other does not, and for a few weeks each spring and autumn you can be an hour off if you reuse last month's arithmetic. Reading a meeting invitation in the wrong zone: put the time zone in the invitation and send it as a calendar event, which converts for each person. Forgetting that the date changes too: a 9 a.m. Tuesday meeting in Tokyo is Monday evening in New York. Counting the end of the working day as available: a meeting that starts at 17:00 is outside 9:00 to 17:00.

Limits of this planner

The city list is a fixed set of 34 major zones, not every place in the database. All participants share one working-hours window, so it cannot represent a team member with different hours, and it does not look at holidays or weekends: a Friday in Dubai or Tel Aviv, or a public holiday in one of the countries, will not show up. Rows start on the hour in the first city's day, so a window that begins on the half hour in another zone is shown by the hour in which it starts. The planner is a first filter for choosing a time; the invitation should still name the time zone explicitly.

Sources and related calculators

Sources: IANA Time Zone Database (tz database) via the browser's Intl.DateTimeFormat; 15 U.S.C. § 260a (daylight saving time in the United States, Energy Policy Act of 2005); Directive 2000/84/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council on summer-time arrangements. Related: time zone converter, military time converter, business days calculator and countdown calculator.