Meeting Time Finder Across Time Zones
Put up to six cities or zones on one grid and see the hours that work for everyone. Pick an hour to lock the meeting, then copy the local time for every person.
Preparing your meeting planner…
How to read the grid
Each column is one real hour of the chosen day in the first location, the one you are planning from. Every other row shows what its own clock reads at those same instants, so a row can start the day behind you and finish it ahead of you. When a row crosses local midnight the cell is marked with a day line, and the row header states whether that location is on the previous day, the same day, the next day, or further still.
Shading answers one question: could this person reasonably take a call? Working hours are the window you set, which defaults to 09:00 to 17:00. The two hours either side are marked as early or late but plausible. Between 22:00 and 07:00 local, the hour is marked as asleep. Weekend hours are never counted as a clean overlap. Every cell also carries its own local hour and a shape marker, and a full sentence for screen readers, so nothing depends on colour alone.
Daylight saving is the trap that breaks meetings
Most broken invitations come from one assumption: that the gap between two cities is fixed. It is not. The United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Iran, and others change their clocks on different dates, so for two or three weeks each spring and autumn the usual difference is an hour out. New York and London are five hours apart for most of the year, four hours apart for two weeks in March, and five again from the end of that month.
This meeting time finder does not multiply one offset across the day. Every cell is a real instant converted through your browser's own IANA time zone database, so a day that contains a clock change shows 23 or 25 hours instead of 24, the hour that never existed is simply missing, and the hour that happens twice is labelled as repeated. When any location in your plan changes its clock on the chosen date, the page says so in plain words below the grid.
Fixed offsets behave differently on purpose. If you add UTC+1 or GMT-5, it stays exactly that all year and never inherits a seasonal change, because a fixed offset is a definition rather than a place. If you want the clock a country actually keeps, add the city or the zone instead.
The date line: two calendar days at the same moment
Earth spans UTC-12 to UTC+14, which is twenty six hours of civil clocks for a twenty four hour day. At any instant the planet is holding two different calendar dates, and at some moments the extremes are two dates apart: it can be Friday evening in Baker Island and Sunday morning in Kiritimati. That is why day labels here are never squeezed into yesterday, today, and tomorrow. A row can honestly read two days ahead, and the planner will say so.
The practical consequence is simple: always confirm the date as well as the time. A Monday 08:00 call in Los Angeles is Tuesday 01:00 in Auckland, and half the confusion in cross-zone scheduling comes from people agreeing on an hour while quietly disagreeing about the day.
Choosing a time people will actually keep
- Share the pain. If one group always takes the early call, rotate the burden across a recurring series rather than fixing it on the smallest team.
- Prefer the middle of a working day over its edges. An hour that lands at 08:30 for one side and 17:30 for the other is technically inside the window and practically the worst slot in it.
- Watch the weekend. Friday afternoon in North America is already Saturday in East Asia and Oceania, so the grid demotes weekend hours instead of offering them as a clean overlap.
- Send the invitation with the date and zone written out, not just an hour. Copy the summary from this page and paste it into the invitation body.
- Remember that public holidays are local. A perfect overlap on a national holiday is still an empty room.
Sharing and privacy
The address bar updates as you work, so the link carries your locations, the date, the selected time, the working-hours window, and your 12 or 24 hour preference. Anyone who opens it sees the same plan. A link that has been truncated or edited is rejected rather than partly applied, and the planner falls back to a sensible default.
Nothing is sent anywhere. Conversions use your browser's built-in IANA time zone database, the same source your operating system uses, and everything is computed on your device.
Meeting Time Finder questions
How many places can I compare?
Six. That is the point where a 24-hour grid still reads at a glance on a phone. If you need more, plan the core group here and check the outliers with the converter.
Why does one row show 25 hours?
Because that local day really is 25 hours long. When clocks go back, one wall-clock hour happens twice. The grid shows both, and the repeated hour is labelled, so a meeting set in it is unambiguous.
Can I plan from a different city?
Yes. Every location chip has a pin button that makes it the row you plan from, and the grid columns switch to that clock's hours.
Does it know about public holidays?
No. The grid models working hours, sleep, and weekends only. Check local holidays separately with the calendar before you send an invitation.
Are the shaded bands a claim about someone's real schedule?
No. They are a simple model built from the window you set plus a fixed 22:00 to 07:00 night band. Shift work, school runs, prayer times, and commutes are not modelled.