How to use Time Now Live: clocks, comparisons and planning

Time Now Live is built to answer one question in under a second — what time is it there right now — and then help you do something useful with the answer. Here is how to get the most out of it.

Find a city fast

Start typing in the search box at the top of any page. After two letters we begin suggesting matching places, ordered by population, so typing lon brings London to the top before you finish the word. Press the down arrow to walk the list and Enter to open a city, or submit the form to see the full result set with a live clock beside every match.

Read a city page

The top of a city page is deliberately blunt: an oversized live clock, the full local date, and the current sunrise, sunset and UTC offset on one line. Below that sits a facts panel with the IANA zone name, whether daylight saving is currently active, the population and the coordinates. These are the details people copy into calendar invites and support tickets.

Compare time zones before you schedule

Every city page carries a diverging bar chart headed Time difference from that city. Bars to the left are hours behind, bars to the right are hours ahead, with a centre axis at zero. Read it left to right and you can see at a glance which of your colleagues are already asleep. Combined with the mini clock strip — five reference cities across the world's busiest zones — it takes seconds to pick a meeting slot that is civilised for everyone.

Use the map

Each city is plotted on an equirectangular world map: one close frame that shows the surrounding region, and one full-world frame that puts the location in global context. Crosshairs mark the exact latitude and longitude. Links beside the map open the same coordinates in Google Maps or Apple Maps if you need street-level detail or directions.

Explore by country

Near the bottom of every city page is a cloud of other places in the same country, sized by population. It is a fast way to hop from a capital to a regional city, or to discover how many named places share a single time zone. Countries that span several zones — the United States, Russia, Australia, Brazil, Indonesia — make this especially useful.

Trust the clock, not your device

The home page shows your own local time and, underneath it, how far your device clock differs from our reference. If that number is more than a couple of seconds, treat any deadline on your own machine with suspicion and use the clock here instead.

Bookmark what you check often

City URLs are short and stable — the city slug and nothing else — so a bookmark or a pinned tab for a city you track daily will keep working. Add the language prefix if you prefer the interface in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Indonesian or Arabic.

On mobile

The layout collapses to a single column, the search suggestions stay tappable, and the clock keeps ticking while the tab is open. Nothing here needs an app.