Knowing the exact time in another city sounds trivial until you are scheduling a call between London and Singapore, checking whether the Tokyo stock exchange is open, or trying to figure out why a timestamp in a server log does not match what you expected. In those moments, a world clock that is actually accurate — not a JavaScript Date() object drifting against your device clock — matters.
Exact Time Now shows the precise current local time in any city worldwide, updated every second using official IANA timezone data and synced to atomic clock sources. It also includes a timezone comparison tool, a meeting planner, a countdown timer, public holiday calendars, and global trading hours — all free, no sign-up, no ads.
Why Time Zone Accuracy Actually Matters
Your device clock is probably right most of the time. But "most of the time" breaks at the edges:
Daylight Saving Time transitions — DST changes happen on different dates in different countries, and in some countries (Arizona in the US, certain parts of Indiana, most of China, Japan, and others) they do not happen at all. A device that has not synced recently, or an app that calculates offsets from a stale rule set, will show the wrong time for weeks after a transition in the other party's country.
Half-hour and quarter-hour offsets — Most people assume time zones are whole-hour offsets from UTC. Several major regions use offsets of UTC+5:30 (India), UTC+5:45 (Nepal), UTC+9:30 (most of Australia's Northern Territory and South Australia), UTC+12:45 (Chatham Islands, New Zealand), and UTC+13:45 (Chatham Islands during DST). A tool that does not handle these correctly will be wrong by 30–45 minutes.
Historical timezone changes — Countries occasionally change their timezone rules by government decree. Venezuela moved from UTC-4:30 to UTC-4 in 2016. Samoa switched from UTC-11 to UTC+13 in 2011, effectively skipping a day. Iran adjusted its DST rules in 2022. The IANA timezone database — the authoritative global record — tracks all of these changes. Exact Time Now pulls from IANA directly.
The World Clock: Every Major City, Updated Every Second
Exact Time Now covers over 150 cities across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania, organised by country for quick scanning. Each city page shows:
- Current local time — updated live every second
- UTC offset — the fixed offset from Coordinated Universal Time for that timezone
- DST status — whether Daylight Saving Time is currently active, and when the next transition occurs
- Timezone name and abbreviation — the IANA identifier (e.g.
Europe/London,America/New_York) and the human-readable abbreviation (GMT, EDT, JST, IST)
The data source is the IANA Time Zone Database — the same database used by every major operating system, programming language runtime, and cloud infrastructure provider to handle timezone conversions. When a country changes its DST rules, the IANA database is updated, and Exact Time Now reflects the change.
Useful reference city pages:
- London — GMT/BST, a reference point for European and global scheduling
- New York City — EST/EDT, US East Coast
- Tokyo — JST (UTC+9, no DST)
- Dubai — GST (UTC+4, no DST)
- Singapore — SGT (UTC+8, no DST)
- Sydney — AEST/AEDT
Time Zone Comparison: See Two Cities Side by Side
The comparison tool answers the question that comes up before every international call: "If it is 3 PM here, what time is it there — and is that a reasonable hour?"
Exact Time Now lets you compare any two cities directly. The comparison page shows both current times simultaneously, updated live, with the UTC offset for each city and the difference between them. Popular pairs include:
- London vs New York — 5 hours apart (4 during US DST transition periods when the clocks change on different weekends)
- Tokyo vs London — 8 or 9 hours depending on UK DST
- Paris vs Dubai — a useful cross-European/Middle-East reference
- New York vs Singapore — 12 or 13 hours apart
- Berlin vs San Francisco — the classic Europe-US West Coast gap
The comparison view handles the DST complexity for you. London and New York change their clocks on different weekends in spring and autumn, which means the gap between them briefly changes from 5 hours to 4 hours each year. If you use a static offset calculation, you will schedule calls at the wrong time during those windows. Exact Time Now reads the live IANA data, so the offset shown is always current.
The Meeting Planner: Schedule Across Multiple Time Zones
Scheduling a call across two time zones is annoying. Scheduling across three or four — a team in London, a client in New York, a contractor in Singapore, and a partner in Sydney — is the kind of thing that turns a simple Slack message into a 20-reply thread.
The Meeting Planner solves this by showing you a grid of times across multiple cities simultaneously. You can see at a glance which hours overlap within reasonable working hours for everyone involved. The grid highlights times that fall within standard business hours for each city, making the "find a slot that works for everyone" problem much faster to solve.
For remote teams, distributed freelancers, and anyone who regularly works across multiple countries, this is the feature that turns Exact Time Now from a reference tool into a daily utility.
Trading Hours: Know When Every Major Market Is Open
Financial markets around the world operate on different hours, and whether they are open on any given day depends on a combination of local time, local public holidays, and exchange-specific schedules. If you trade, manage investments, or simply need to know whether you can execute a transaction right now, the Trading Hours tool gives you a live view of which major markets are currently open.
Covered exchanges include the major global markets across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. The tool shows:
- Whether the exchange is currently open or closed
- Current local time at the exchange's home city
- Today's opening and closing times in local time
- Whether it is a holiday or early-close day
This is particularly useful for professionals in international finance, anyone working across markets in different time zones, or developers building applications that need to know market status without maintaining their own exchange calendar data.
The Countdown Timer: Precise, Shareable, and Clean
The Countdown Timer lets you set a countdown to any future date and time, with the result shown to the second. The URL updates to encode your countdown target, so you can share a link that shows the same countdown to anyone who opens it — no sign-up, no app.
Practical uses:
- A deadline shared with a client or team: "The proposal is due in —" followed by a link that shows the exact time remaining
- A product launch countdown sent to a mailing list
- An event countdown embedded in a Notion page or Slack channel
- A personal deadline timer for any time-boxed task
The countdown is shown in days, hours, minutes, and seconds, updated live. It handles timezone correctly — if your countdown target is midnight New York time, and someone opens it from Tokyo, they see the time remaining to that exact moment in New York time.
Public Holiday Calendars
The Holidays section covers public holiday calendars for countries worldwide. Knowing whether your contact's country has a public holiday this week before sending a chaser email is a small thing that makes a meaningful difference in professional communication — and it is the kind of thing that is easy to forget when you are working across multiple countries.
The calendar shows national holidays, notes which ones are bank holidays (affecting financial transactions and business operations), and covers the current year. For international teams, checking the holiday calendar before scheduling deadlines is a habit worth building.
Available in Four Languages
Exact Time Now is available in English, Spanish, French, and Chinese — covering the primary working languages of the majority of its international user base. The interface, city names, and time displays are fully localised in each language, making it useful for teams and individuals who prefer to work in a language other than English.
The underlying timezone data is the same regardless of language — IANA does not change when the language does. But having the interface in a team member's preferred language reduces friction and makes the tool more immediately usable for non-English speakers.
Who Uses Exact Time Now
The tool is built for the reality of modern distributed work and international communication. The people who get the most out of it:
Remote workers and distributed teams who have colleagues in multiple time zones and need to schedule meetings, track working hours, or know whether a teammate is likely to be online right now.
Freelancers and contractors working internationally who need to confirm their local time matches what a client expects, especially across DST transitions when the offset changes unexpectedly.
Finance professionals and traders who need to know whether a specific market is open before executing a transaction or confirming a settlement window.
Developers and sysadmins who need to correlate timestamps across timezones when debugging, reading server logs, or coordinating deployments across global infrastructure.
Travellers and expats who want to know the exact local time in their home city or a city they are visiting, with accurate DST status rather than a stale cached offset.
Event organisers and project managers who are coordinating teams, launches, or deadlines across multiple countries and need a countdown or comparison tool that handles DST transitions correctly.
Free, No Sign-Up, IANA-Powered
Everything described in this article is free. There is no account to create, no premium tier hiding the meeting planner or trading hours behind a paywall, and no sign-up required for any feature. The site is available immediately at exact-time.now.
The data source — the IANA Time Zone Database — is the same one used by Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, Python's pytz, Node.js, Java, and every major cloud provider. It is maintained by a team of volunteers and administrators who track timezone rule changes globally and publish updates as they occur. When a government changes its DST rules, the IANA database is the authoritative source, and Exact Time Now reflects those updates.
For any task where the time needs to be right — not approximately right, not right-most-of-the-time — exact-time.now is the reference to bookmark.
FAQ
What is Exact Time Now?
Exact Time Now is a free world clock that shows the precise current local time in over 150 cities worldwide, updated every second using official IANA timezone data. It also includes timezone comparison, a meeting planner, a countdown timer, public holiday calendars, and global trading hours. It is available at exact-time.now with no sign-up required.
How accurate is the time shown on Exact Time Now?
The time data is sourced from the IANA Time Zone Database — the global authoritative standard for timezone rules, used by every major operating system and programming language. Times are displayed with real-time updates every second. The display accuracy depends on your device clock, but the timezone rules and offsets are always current with the latest IANA release.
What is the IANA Time Zone Database?
The IANA Time Zone Database (sometimes called the Olson database or tz database) is a collaborative public-domain database of timezone rules for every country and territory in the world. It tracks UTC offsets, Daylight Saving Time rules, and historical changes. It is the authoritative source used by Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, Python, Node.js, Java, and most cloud infrastructure. It is updated whenever a government changes its timezone rules.
How does the meeting planner work?
The Meeting Planner shows a side-by-side grid of hours across multiple cities, highlighting which times fall within standard business hours in each location. You can use it to find overlapping windows where everyone you need to involve is likely to be available during their working day.
Can I share a countdown with someone in a different time zone?
Yes. The Countdown Timer encodes your target time into the URL, so sharing the link gives anyone who opens it an accurate countdown to the same moment in time, displayed correctly for their own timezone.
Does Exact Time Now handle Daylight Saving Time automatically?
Yes. DST transitions are handled automatically using IANA data, which tracks the specific DST rules for every country. This includes countries that do not observe DST at all (Japan, China, UAE, India), countries with unusual half-hour or quarter-hour offsets, and the specific transition dates that differ between the US, UK, and EU each spring and autumn.
Does the trading hours tool cover all major exchanges?
The Trading Hours tool covers the major global exchanges across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, with live open/closed status, today's session hours in local time, and holiday close information. It is not an exhaustive list of every exchange globally but covers the markets most relevant to international financial professionals.
Is there an API?
The site is built on IANA data with a real-time clock sync layer. If you are a developer looking to integrate timezone data into an application, the IANA database itself is freely available. Exact Time Now's primary offering is the human-readable web interface rather than an API endpoint.