Free Time Zone Meeting Planner
Find the perfect meeting time across cities. Visualize working hours, spot overlaps instantly, and stop scheduling meetings at 3 AM for your colleagues.
Reference city
Times are shown relative to New York's clock.
4/8 cities
New Yorkref
6:28 AM · EDT
Los Angeles
3:28 AM · PDT (-3h)
London
11:28 AM · GMT+1 (+5h)
Dubai
2:28 PM · GMT+4 (+8h)
Working hours default to 9 AM – 5 PM local. Daylight saving time is calculated automatically using each city's IANA timezone — so the chart stays correct year-round.
Schedule Across Time Zones, Painlessly
For distributed teams and global businesses, finding a meeting time that doesn't inconvenience someone is the daily friction.
50+ World Cities
Pre-loaded with major business hubs across the US, Americas, Europe, Middle East, Asia, and Pacific. Includes all US cities (NYC, LA, Chicago, Denver, Phoenix, Honolulu) plus London, Dubai, São Paulo, Tokyo, Singapore, Mumbai, and more.
Visual Overlap Bar
A dedicated “overlap density” bar shows at-a-glance which hours all your selected cities are working at the same time. The darker the bar, the more cities are available — pick the darkest column for the easiest meeting.
DST-Aware
Uses IANA timezone data for every city, so daylight saving transitions are handled automatically. The chart is correct whether it's March or November, summer or winter.
Live “Now” Marker
A red dot marks the current hour in the reference city — and the chart updates every minute. You instantly see where “now” sits relative to everyone's working day.
Click to Compare
Click any hour to highlight it across all cities. See instantly what “3 PM in New York” means everywhere else — no mental math, no Googling, no Slack-pinging colleagues to ask.
100% Private
Runs entirely in your browser using JavaScript's built-in Intl API. No location tracking, no data collection, no signup. Just open the page and start planning.
Who Uses It?
Anyone whose work crosses time zones — which now includes most knowledge workers.
Distributed Teams
US-only teams across NYC, Austin, Denver, LA: find the hour that hits everyone's working day without burning anyone's morning or evening.
Global Companies
London ↔ NYC ↔ Singapore ↔ Sydney — the “follow-the-sun” meeting cadence. Find when everyone's reasonably awake.
Travelers
On the road for client work or a conference? Quickly check what time it is back home before scheduling calls or sending emails.
Customer Support
Set up coverage shifts that span time zones, or just confirm a customer's local time before promising a callback.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does the overlap bar work?
For each hour of your reference city's day, we count how many of the selected cities are in their working hours. The darker the bar at a given hour, the more cities are available. The very darkest shade means all selected cities are working simultaneously — that's your ideal meeting time. The lightest means none of them are.
Does this handle daylight saving time?
Yes. The tool uses IANA timezone identifiers (like America/New_York, Europe/London, Asia/Dubai) which encode each region's DST rules. So when New York shifts from EST to EDT in March, the chart updates automatically — and London stays on GMT until late March, briefly changing the NY↔London offset from 5 hours to 4 hours during that gap.
Why 9–5 working hours?
9 AM to 5 PM is the typical office workday in most countries this tool covers. Some regions have local norms — UAE and Saudi Arabia commonly run 9–6, Spain and Italy often 9–6 with a long midday break, India 10–7. We use the local norm where possible. Custom working hours per city are on the roadmap.
What does “reference city” mean?
The reference city is the one whose hours appear on the horizontal axis — typically the city you're in, or the city of whoever is scheduling. Every other city's timeline is shown relative to the reference. Change the reference dropdown to flip the perspective.
My city isn't in the list. Can I add it?
For now, the tool ships with ~50 major business hub cities. If your city shares a timezone with one of them (e.g. Pittsburgh shares with New York, Glasgow shares with London), use that one. Custom city addition (with any IANA timezone) is on the roadmap.
Can I see hours outside of working time?
Yes — the timeline always shows the full 24-hour day for each city. Hours in working time are colored emerald; hours outside are colored stone-grey. Hovering or clicking any hour shows the exact local time in every city.
What's the maximum number of cities?
Up to 8 cities can be displayed at once. Beyond that the timeline becomes hard to scan and overlap windows get unrealistically narrow. For very large global teams, plan meetings by region instead — schedule one for the Americas, one for EMEA, one for APAC.
Does this work for past or future dates?
The current version shows the overlap as of today. The underlying timezone logic correctly handles DST transitions when you load the page in winter vs. summer. Custom date selection (to plan a meeting in 6 months when DST is different) is on the roadmap.
Working Across Time Zones
Remote and distributed work has made time-zone coordination a daily skill for tens of millions of knowledge workers. The challenge isn't technological — Zoom and Slack work fine in any time zone — it's social and ergonomic. Find the wrong meeting time, and someone in Singapore is on a 10 PM call after their kids' bedtime, or someone in California is up at 6 AM to talk to London. Find the right time, and everyone walks away thinking the meeting was efficient.
The Math of Time Zone Overlap
Two cities in the same time zone share a full 8-hour working day. Two cities 3 hours apart (e.g. New York and Los Angeles) share 5 hours — both are awake from 12 PM ET to 5 PM ET. Two cities 8 hours apart (e.g. London and San Francisco) share zero hours of standard 9-5 overlap unless you stretch one side's day. Two cities 12 hours apart (e.g. New York and Singapore) have no realistic overlap at all — one person is always working at the edges of their day.
The overlap math compounds with each new city. Adding a third city often cuts the overlap to 1-2 hours; adding a fourth can leave you with nothing. This tool's overlap density bar makes that geometry visible so you can spot the “sweet spot” immediately — or accept that there isn't one and plan accordingly.
Common Time Zone Pairings
NY ↔ London (5 hrs): 9-11 AM ET = 2-4 PM London. The classic transatlantic overlap window.
NY ↔ LA (3 hrs): 12-5 PM ET = 9 AM-2 PM PT. The biggest US coast-to-coast window. Morning ET = pre-work PT; evening PT = after-work ET.
SF ↔ London (8 hrs): 8-9 AM PT = 4-5 PM London. A narrow window at the edges of both days.
NY ↔ Dubai (8 or 9 hrs depending on DST): 8-10 AM ET = 4-6 PM Dubai. Morning meetings on the US side.
NY ↔ Mumbai/Bangalore (9.5 or 10.5 hrs): 8-9 AM ET = 5:30-6:30 PM India. The most common US-India tech-team handoff window.
NY ↔ Tokyo (13 or 14 hrs): Almost no normal overlap. Either 7 AM ET = 8 PM Tokyo, or 8 PM ET = 9 AM next-day Tokyo.
Daylight Saving Time — A Brief Annoyance
DST adds chaos to global scheduling because not all countries observe it, and those that do switch on different dates. The most common impact:
- US and Canada switch on the second Sunday of March; Europe switches on the last Sunday of March. For ~2 weeks each year, the New York–London gap is 4 hours instead of the usual 5.
- US and Canada return to standard time on the first Sunday of November; Europe on the last Sunday of October. For ~1 week each year, the NY-London gap is 6 hours.
- Most of Asia (Japan, China, India, Southeast Asia), Africa, and the Middle East do not observe DST. Their offsets change relative to the US/Europe in spring and fall.
- Arizona (most of) and Hawaii in the US do not observe DST. Phoenix is on Mountain Time in winter but Pacific Time in summer — sort of.
This tool handles all of that automatically — but a recurring calendar invite scheduled in winter may shift relative to people in Asia when March arrives. Re-check meeting times around the DST transitions.
Etiquette for Cross-Time-Zone Scheduling
Rotate the “bad hour”. If your only overlap requires someone to take a meeting at 7 AM or 9 PM, rotate which side has the bad time across recurring meetings. Don't default the inconvenience to one team.
Default to async where possible. Across 10+ hour gaps, a real-time meeting often costs more than it's worth. Slack threads, Loom recordings, and shared documents can resolve most coordination without scheduling pain.
Set core overlap hours. Distributed teams that define a 2-3 hour daily “core overlap” (when everyone is expected to be online) get the benefits of synchronicity without forcing everyone's entire day to align.
Be explicit about timezone in invites. “3 PM” means nothing. “3 PM Eastern (UTC-5)” tells everyone what to compute. Calendar tools now do this automatically — but only if you set the timezone correctly when creating the event.
Respect deep work time. The most expensive meeting isn't the one that's inconvenient — it's the one that interrupts focus time. Cluster meetings into a few hours each day, leaving large blocks for individual work, especially across time zones where async predominates anyway.