World Time Zone Map
Every one of the 301 IANA time zones, drawn with its real boundaries. Click anywhere for that zone's current local time, UTC offset and identifier. The dark region is the night side of the Earth right now. Every offset in use is also listed as a table further down, so nothing here depends on the map loading.
Map loads when it scrolls into view…
Daylight Night — the sun is below the horizon there now Colour = UTC offset
Select a zone on the map to see its current time.
What the map is actually showing
Each shape is a real IANA time zone boundary, not a country outline. That
distinction is the whole point: America/Chicago is its own
region rather than part of an undifferentiated United States, Arizona is
cut out of Mountain Time because it does not observe daylight saving, and
the handful of Indiana counties that spent decades disagreeing with their
neighbours are visible as their own slivers.
Boundaries follow county lines, rivers and negotiated strips, so the raw dataset is about 150 MB. What loads here is a simplified version: coastlines are smoother than reality, but every border between zones is the real one, and all 301 zones are present and clickable — including the ones small enough to be a couple of pixels.
The projection is equirectangular, normally an unfashionable choice because it distorts area badly near the poles. Here it is the right one: longitude maps linearly to horizontal position, so a time zone occupies a straight vertical band and the day/night terminator reads as a clean sine curve rather than a warped blob.
Colour encodes offset, which means neighbouring countries sharing a colour share a clock today — not necessarily next month. Zones that enter daylight saving on different dates diverge and rejoin through the year, which is exactly the trap the EST to CET converter documents week by week.
Countries that span several zones
23 of the 177 countries listed further down keep more than one clock. Russia alone spans eleven. Because this map is drawn by zone rather than by country, each of those is a separate region you can click — so US Central Time has its own shape, and clicking Texas gives you Chicago's clock rather than New York's.
China is the interesting opposite case: it covers five geographic zones but
legislates one clock for all of them, Asia/Shanghai. In the far
west the sun can rise past 10:00 by the official time. It is a useful
reminder that time zones are law rather than geography, which is precisely
why you should store the IANA identifier and not an offset — the identifier
carries the legislation, and the legislation changes.
Every UTC offset in use right now
32 distinct offsets across 177 countries, as of this page's last build. Offsets marked with a half or quarter hour are not errors — India, Iran, Nepal, the Chatham Islands and others sit deliberately off the hour.
Related tools
Frequently asked questions
How many time zones are there in the world?
There are 32 distinct UTC offsets in use right now across the 177 countries on this map, though the count changes through the year as different regions enter and leave daylight saving. The IANA database defines far more zones than offsets — over 400 — because a zone records a place's whole history of rule changes, not just the number its clock currently shows.
Does this map show real time zone boundaries?
Yes. Every shape is an actual IANA zone boundary from the timezone-boundary-builder dataset, which is built from OpenStreetMap. That means US Central Time is its own region rather than part of a single United States blob, Indiana's county-level exceptions are visible, and Western Australia is separated from the eastern states. The outlines are simplified for the web, so a coastline is smoother here than in reality, but the borders between zones are the real ones.
Which countries have more than one time zone?
23 of the countries listed on this page span more than one zone — Russia with eleven, the United States with six, and Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Greenland, Chile and the DR Congo among the rest. Because the map is drawn by zone rather than by country, each of those appears as a separate clickable region. China is the opposite case: it covers five geographic zones but legislates one clock, Asia/Shanghai, so it renders as a single block.
What is the shaded area on the map?
The night side of the Earth — the region where the sun is currently below the horizon. Its shape is computed from the solar declination for today's date and the current UTC time, so it tilts through the year and sweeps westward as the planet turns. Near the solstices it reaches over one pole entirely, which is the polar day and polar night.
Is the time on this map accurate?
It reads your own device clock, so it is exactly as accurate as your machine is, and the offsets come from your browser's IANA database. For anything where accuracy matters, synchronise against NTP rather than trusting a browser — and stamp server-side rather than accepting a client timestamp.