July 8, 2026 9 min read

How to Schedule Meetings Across Time Zones

To schedule a meeting across time zones, convert everyone's working hours to UTC, find the hours they share (the overlap), pick a slot inside it and send the invite with each attendee's local time written out. If there is no overlap, rotate who takes the early or late slot, or move the work to written handoffs.

Start with the overlap

Overlap hours are the hours when every attendee is inside their normal working day. They are the only hours a meeting costs nobody an evening or an early alarm, so find them before you look at anyone's calendar.

If both sides keep the same working day, the math is short: overlap = length of the working day minus the time difference. With a 9:00 to 17:00 day (8 hours), New York and London, 5 hours apart, share 3 hours. New York and Berlin, 6 hours apart, share 2. San Francisco and London, 8 hours apart, share nothing at all.

Worked in UTC, the New York and London case looks like this on a January day. New York is UTC-5, so 9:00 to 17:00 there is 14:00 to 22:00 UTC. London is UTC+0, so its day is 09:00 to 17:00 UTC. The two ranges meet from 14:00 to 17:00 UTC, which is 9:00 AM to noon in New York and 2 to 5 PM in London.

A five-step method

1. List the cities, not the zone names. "Pacific time" hides whether someone is in Los Angeles or Vancouver, and those two places no longer behave the same way (see below). A city maps to one IANA zone, such as America/New_York, with its full history of clock changes.
2. Convert each city to UTC for the meeting date. Use the offset on that date, not today's. The time zone converter does this per date, so a meeting in November is checked against November offsets.
3. Mark each person's working hours in UTC. Ask for real hours. A parent in Bengaluru who stops at 6 PM and a developer in Berlin who starts at 10 AM change the answer more than the offsets do.
4. Pick the window. Prefer the middle of the overlap over its edges, since a slot at someone's 8:55 AM or 5:55 PM tends to slip into personal time.
5. Write the invite in the attendees' local times. Put the UTC time and two or three local times in the title or the first line: "Planning, 15:00 UTC (11:00 New York, 16:00 London, 20:30 Bengaluru)". Calendar apps convert automatically, but the written line catches the person whose calendar is set to the wrong zone.

For writing times in a way nobody misreads, see how to write times with time zones. If you keep a second zone visible in your own calendar, showing two time zones in a calendar covers the settings.

Common team pairs and their windows

The table uses a 9:00 to 17:00 day on both sides and offsets checked against the tz database (tzdata 2026c). "Stretch" is the window if both sides start at 8:00 and finish at 18:00, which many distributed teams accept a few times a week.

Sydney is a day ahead, so a Tuesday afternoon in San Francisco is Wednesday morning in Sydney. Bengaluru is on UTC+5:30 all year, which is why its gap to New York changes by an hour while London's does not. For the US and India case in detail, including shifted Indian working hours, see meeting times for US, UK and India teams. Two more pairs get their own guides: US and Europe meetings and Europe and India meetings.

Check the live times before you commit: New York, London, Berlin, Bengaluru, Singapore, San Francisco and Sydney each show the current offset and the next clock change.

The DST weeks that break recurring meetings

The US and Europe both use daylight saving time, but not on the same dates. US clocks go forward on the second Sunday of March and back on the first Sunday of November (15 U.S.C. 260a). The EU and the UK change on the last Sunday of March and the last Sunday of October, at 01:00 UTC everywhere at once.

A weekly call booked by a New York organizer at 10:00 AM stays at 10:00 AM in New York, so in those weeks it lands at 14:00 in London instead of 15:00. Calendars handle this correctly, but people who memorized "my 3 PM call" do not. Send a one-line reminder the Friday before each switch.

The southern hemisphere moves the other way. Sydney goes forward on the first Sunday of October and back on the first Sunday of April, so the San Francisco to Sydney gap passes through 19, 18 and 17 hours in a year. India, China, Japan and Singapore do not change their clocks at all, so every gap to them moves whenever the other side switches.

Canada adds a new case this year. British Columbia and Alberta have adopted year-round time at their summer offsets, so Vancouver stays at UTC-7 and Calgary at UTC-6 when the US falls back on 1 November 2026. From then on, Vancouver is one hour ahead of Seattle and San Francisco in winter, and only two hours behind Toronto. Recurring meetings set in Vancouver time will look an hour different to US colleagues from November to March.

Rotate the inconvenient slot

Some teams have no fair slot. San Francisco, London and Singapore in July sit at UTC-7, UTC+1 and UTC+8, a 15-hour spread, so somebody always loses. The fix is to rotate who loses.

Rotate weekly or monthly, and publish the schedule so nobody has to ask. In practice many teams drop the worst slot (1 AM is not a meeting time) and alternate the other two, with the third region watching a recording.

Weekdays differ too. The UAE moved its federal working week to Monday to Friday from 1 January 2022, with a short Friday and a Saturday and Sunday weekend. In Israel most offices work Sunday to Thursday. A Monday meeting with Tel Aviv is fine, but a Friday afternoon one is not, and a Sunday status call is a normal workday there and a day off in Dubai.

When there is no overlap

If the stretch window is empty or only one side ever pays, stop forcing a call. GitLab's handbook for its all-remote company asks people to consider an asynchronous option before booking a meeting, to review every participant's time zone when a meeting is needed, and to record group meetings that span time zones so others can follow later. That is a sound default for any team.

• Written handoffs. Each region ends its day with a short note: what changed, what is blocked, what the next region should pick up.
• Recorded updates. A five-minute screen recording replaces a status meeting and can be watched at any hour.
• Follow the sun. Support and operations teams in three regions spaced about eight hours apart (for example Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific) hand open work to the next region as their day ends, so tickets keep moving around the clock.
• One live meeting a month. Keep a single rotated call for the decisions that need a conversation.

Tools that do the math

The time zone converter turns one date and time into every attendee's local time and accounts for the clock changes on that date. The world clock keeps your team's cities side by side, which is the quickest way to see whether it is a sensible hour somewhere before you message. Most calendar apps can also show a second time zone in the week view.

For your next recurring meeting, put the attendees' cities into the converter for a date in the last week of October, and confirm the slot still sits inside everyone's day.

Frequently asked questions