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Basetime

Office hours, city by city

When offices are open in 248 cities, each on its own clock. 189 of them sit in a time zone their country's headline zone does not cover, which is exactly where a national answer stops being useful: asking when you can phone the United States has no answer, and asking when you can phone Chicago does.

East to west, through the working day

Ordered by offset. Read down and you are walking through the day: the cities at the top opened hours ago.

UTC

Each bar is that city's office day, all of them on one UTC axis. The green line is now — the bars it crosses are at work. Read down and the day walks west.

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.
Core city set: names, countries, coordinates, IANA zones
Source: IANA tzdb for zones, public geographic data for coordinates. Last checked, reviewed every 12 months.

FAQ

Why a city and not the country?

Because a country is not a clock. The United States spans six zones and Australia three, so a single national figure is not an approximation but somebody else's answer. Where a city sits in its country's main zone the two pages agree, and the city page still gives you the overlap measured from that exact place.

Are these hours the law?

They are a national convention for office work, drawn from published labour rules and government guidance, read on this city's clock. Individual employers vary, and shift work, retail and hospitality do not follow it at all.