About Time Now Live: an accurate world clock and time zone directory

Time Now Live began with a small, annoying problem: two people on a call disagreeing about what time it was. One laptop was minutes fast, the other was in a country that had just changed its daylight saving rules, and every website they checked simply echoed whatever the device clock said. We built the site we wanted to exist that afternoon.

What we do

We publish an accurate, fast-loading local clock for more than a million cities, towns and administrative regions, together with the facts that make the clock useful: the IANA time zone identifier, the current UTC offset, whether daylight saving is active, sunrise and sunset for today, day length, coordinates and a map. Where it helps, we add a time-difference comparison against major world cities so you can plan rather than just look.

How we keep it accurate

Three engineering decisions do most of the work.

• We never trust the device clock. Time is anchored to a reference timestamp from our own servers, and the difference against your machine is measured and shown to you.
• We never hard-code offsets. Every city resolves through its IANA zone, so daylight saving transitions and government rule changes are picked up from the time zone database rather than from a spreadsheet someone forgot to update.
• We compute solar events from coordinates. Sunrise, sunset and day length are calculated from each city's latitude and longitude, and polar day and polar night are labelled honestly instead of being fudged.

Where our data comes from

Place names, coordinates, population figures and time zone assignments come from open geographic datasets, principally the GeoNames gazetteer. Time zone rules come from the IANA time zone database, the same source used by operating systems and programming languages. Solar calculations use published astronomical algorithms. We clean and normalise this data — deduplicating names, generating stable URLs, resolving collisions between places that share a name — but we do not invent it.

What we are careful about

Population figures reflect the most recent census or estimate in our source data, which can lag reality in fast-growing cities. Administrative boundaries occasionally place a district in a different zone from the one locals would name. Sunrise and sunset are horizon calculations and take no account of mountains, buildings or unusual atmospheric conditions. Where we are uncertain, we would rather say so than present a confident wrong answer.

Corrections welcome

If a place is missing, mislabelled, assigned to the wrong time zone, or spelled in a way that looks wrong to someone who lives there, tell us. Local knowledge has fixed more entries on this site than any automated check, and corrections from residents are the fastest route to a better directory.

Independence

Time Now Live is independently operated and funded by advertising. Advertising placement never affects which cities we list, how we rank search results, or the accuracy of anything we publish.