Meeting planner across time zones
Pick two cities and see exactly when their working days overlap, in both local clocks and in UTC. It uses each country's real office hours and rest days rather than assuming a nine-to-five everywhere, so a Friday call with Riyadh or a Sunday one with Cairo does not catch you out. Free, no sign-in.
Your team keeps different hours?
National conventions are the default and the public figure. Change them here for your own answer — the chart, the window and the calendar file all follow.
Not on that day. Saturday is a rest day in both Lisbon and New York. The hours above are what you would share on a day you are both at work.
How to use this
- Pick the two cities. The result goes into the address bar, so you can send the link and they see the same answer.
- Read the shared bar: that is the stretch when both sides are inside their own working day, named in UTC underneath.
- Check the working week below it. Hours matter less than whether you are both at work that day.
Worth knowing: This compares national working conventions, not any one employer's hours. If your team starts at ten, shift the window accordingly.
Common pairings, already worked out
Ranked by how much working time they share, most to least. Each links to the full hour-by-hour table.
- 8h New York and São Paulo easy · 13:00–21:00 UTC
- 6h Oslo and London easy · 08:00–14:00 UTC
- 4.5h Oslo and Bangkok workable · 06:00–10:30 UTC
- 4h Oslo and Singapore workable · 06:00–10:00 UTC
- 3h New York and London tight · 13:00–16:00 UTC
- 3h Berlin and Tokyo tight · 06:00–09:00 UTC
- 3h Oslo and Tokyo tight · 06:00–09:00 UTC
- 2h London and Singapore tight · 08:00–10:00 UTC
- 1h Oslo and New York hard · 13:00–14:00 UTC
- 0h London and Los Angeles brutal
- 0h San Francisco and Berlin brutal
- 0h San Francisco and Singapore brutal
Why a nine-to-five answer is usually wrong
Almost every timezone tool converts your clock to theirs and stops there. That is a conversion, not an answer: knowing 15:00 in Oslo is 09:00 in New York does not tell you whether either of you is at work. The gap matters most exactly where people assume it does not.
Norwegian offices typically run 09:00–17:00 where British ones run 09:00–17:00, so an Oslo–London window that a generic tool calls seven hours is really six. Push that further and it stops being a rounding error: in several Gulf states the working week is Sunday to Thursday, so a Friday meeting lands on their weekend while a Sunday one does not.
So this planner asks the smaller, more useful question — when are you both actually at work — and answers it with the hours each country keeps. Where we hold no figure for a country the page says it is assuming a nine-to-five rather than implying we checked.
When the answer is "do not meet"
Some pairings have no shared working hours at all, and no amount of interface design changes that. San Francisco and Singapore is the classic one. When that happens you have three real options and it is worth naming them: someone takes the call outside their hours, you alternate who does so, or the thing that was going to be a meeting becomes a written update. A planner that always produces a recommended time is hiding the third option, which is frequently the right one.
Sources and last check
Times, offsets and sun positions on this page are computed live from the IANA timezone database and the NOAA solar algorithm, so they do not depend on the review dates below.
- Working hours and weekend days for 55 countries
- Source: Published national labour conventions and government working-hours guidance. Last checked, reviewed every 12 months.
Not covered:A national convention, not any given employer. Countries not listed fall back to a nine-to-five, Monday to Friday default, and pages say so rather than implying we checked. - Curated city set: names, countries, coordinates, IANA zones
- Source: IANA tzdb for zones, public geographic data for coordinates. Last checked, reviewed every 12 months.
FAQ
How do you decide the best time to meet?
By intersecting the two working days, not the two clocks. Each city's office hours are converted to UTC and the shared stretch is what you see. Because the hours come from each country rather than a blanket nine-to-five, the answer changes when the countries do — Norway finishes at four, Portugal at six, and that is an hour of difference the generic version gets wrong.
What if there is no overlap at all?
Then the honest answer is that no time suits both, and the planner says so rather than picking the least bad hour and presenting it as a recommendation. San Francisco and Singapore share nothing, for instance. When that happens the choice is between someone working outside their hours, splitting the difference on a rotation, or handling it asynchronously.
Does it handle daylight saving?
Yes, and it does not store a table of offsets that can go stale. Offsets are resolved live from each city's IANA time zone, so the answer is right even in the weeks around spring and autumn when countries switch on different dates and the difference between two cities temporarily changes.
Does it know about different working weeks?
Yes. Several countries rest on Friday and Saturday rather than Saturday and Sunday, and a few work a half day. Where the two working weeks do not line up the planner names the days you actually share and says which side is working while the other is off.
Do I need an account?
No. There is no sign-in, no calendar connection and no advertising. The result is in the URL, so sending someone the link sends them the same answer.