Meeting Time Zone Planner

The grid shows one full day, hour by hour, in the first participant's time zone (by default, yours). Each row translates those same 24 moments into another city's local clock. A cell shaded solid blue means that person is inside normal working hours, 9:00 to 17:59. A light blue cell means they are awake but outside office hours, 7:00 to 8:59 or 18:00 to 21:59. A gray cell means they would normally be asleep.

The planner does the comparison for you. A best time to meet card shows the single strongest window, the longest stretch of hours where all participants are in working hours (labeled Ideal). If no such hour exists, it falls back to the longest stretch where everyone is at least awake (labeled Workable), and every other qualifying window is listed below the grid. If even that fails, it says so plainly rather than pretending a 3:00 call is fine for someone. Tap any hour column in the grid to see that exact moment spelled out for every city.

As a starting point before you add your own cities, here are the realistic overlap windows for the region pairs people schedule most, in each side's local clock (northern-summer clocks; the planner adjusts for the exact date).

For the full overlap table across a dozen region pairs, the per-region deep dives, and the daylight-saving shifts that move these windows, see our guide to the best time to schedule a meeting across time zones.

A normal world time clock tells you what time it is in each city right now. That is a start, but it leaves the hard part to you: scanning five clocks and working out the one hour that is reasonable for everyone. This planner is a world clock for meetings, it shows every participant's local time across the whole day, then finds the overlap for you and marks the windows where the group can actually meet.

Because it compares up to six cities at once, it works as a multiple time zone meeting planner and international call planner for global teams: add offices in New York, London, Bangalore, and Sydney and the grid handles every offset, half-hour zone, and daylight saving rule for the date you choose. Whether you are coordinating two people or a company spread across continents, it turns a wall of world clocks into a single, clear answer.

Most scheduling mistakes come from treating time zones as fixed offsets. They are not. Daylight saving time starts and ends on different dates in different places: the US springs forward in early March, Europe in late March, and Australia moves in the opposite direction because its seasons are reversed. For a few weeks each year the usual gap between New York and London is 4 hours instead of 5, and a recurring meeting that was fine in February suddenly lands during someone's commute.

The international date line adds a second trap: when it is Thursday afternoon in San Francisco it is already Friday morning in Sydney, so "let's meet Friday" means two different days depending on who says it. Half hour offsets (India at UTC+5:30, for example) break mental math too. This planner sidesteps all of it by computing each cell from a real instant in time using each city's official IANA time zone rules, so DST switches, date changes, and odd offsets are handled for the exact date you pick. When a participant's time lands on a different calendar day than the reference city, the grid shows a small weekday label inside that cell so nobody books "Friday" on someone else's Saturday.

For a one-off call, someone taking an 8:00 or a 20:00 slot is a small favor. For a weekly meeting, always giving the bad slot to the same region quietly burns people out. If your group spans more than about 8 hours of offset, rotate the meeting time: alternate between a time that suits the Americas and one that suits Asia Pacific, so the early morning or late evening burden moves around instead of becoming one office's permanent tax.

Two more habits help. First, keep the live meeting short and move status updates into a shared document that people read in their own morning. Second, record every session, so skipping an occurrence at 22:00 local is a real option rather than a career risk. Our guide on scheduling meetings across time zones covers rotation patterns and async alternatives in more depth.

The planner tells you when a meeting is theoretically possible. It cannot tell you that Priya has a dentist appointment or that half the Berlin office is at an offsite. Working hours are a model; calendars are reality. So treat the overlap window as a shortlist, not a decision.

The reliable next step is a quick availability poll: propose a few slots from the Ideal or Workable window, share one link, and let everyone mark when they are actually free, each person seeing the times in their own time zone. You get a single grid showing the slot that works for the most people, without a reply-all thread. Once the time is set, our add to calendar link generator turns it into a one-click calendar entry, and if you are wondering whether the meeting is worth 6 people's time at all, the meeting cost calculator will tell you.