October 2, 2026 7 min read

New Year Around the World: Which Places Celebrate First and Last

The first inhabited place to reach New Year is Kiritimati (Christmas Island) in Kiribati’s Line Islands, which runs on UTC+14. Its midnight comes at 10:00 UTC on December 31, which is 5:00 a.m. that morning in New York. The last inhabited places, American Samoa and Niue at UTC-11, get there 25 hours later.

Who sees midnight first

New Year arrives in order of UTC offset: the further ahead of UTC a place is, the sooner its clocks reach midnight. Nobody is further ahead than the Line Islands of Kiribati, whose zone is Pacific/Kiritimati at UTC+14 all year.

Fifteen minutes later come New Zealand’s Chatham Islands, on UTC+13:45 during the New Zealand summer. Then, at 11:00 UTC, a whole group reaches midnight together on UTC+13: Samoa, Tonga, Tokelau, Kiribati’s Phoenix Islands and mainland New Zealand, where Auckland is on daylight saving time in January. Fiji and Kiribati’s capital, Tarawa, follow an hour later at UTC+12.

Note the trap in that list: Kiribati is one country with three time zones. Tarawa, in the Gilbert Islands, is on UTC+12 and celebrates two hours after Kiritimati.

Who sees it last

The last places with residents are American Samoa and Niue, both on UTC-11. Their midnight comes at 11:00 UTC on January 1, when Kiritimati is already at 1:00 a.m. on January 2. Samoa and American Samoa are close neighbours, yet their New Years are a full 24 hours apart.

Technically the very last zone is UTC-12. It is a nautical zone: ships on the high seas just east of the 180th meridian keep it, and the tz database has a generic Etc/GMT+12 entry for it. No town or settlement uses it, so for a party you can attend, Pago Pago is the end of the line.

Why the gap is 26 hours

A day is 24 hours, so it seems odd that New Year takes longer than that to cross the planet. The reason is that time zones do not stop at UTC+12 and UTC-12. Political borders pushed some offsets past those limits, so the range runs from UTC+14 to UTC-12, which is 26 hours.

Counting only inhabited places, from UTC+14 to UTC-11, the celebration lasts 25 hours. That spread means three dates are in use at once for one hour every day, from 10:00 to 11:00 UTC: on January 1 at that hour it is still the 11 p.m. hour of December 31 in Pago Pago and already past midnight on January 2 in Kiritimati. Another odd result is that Kiritimati and Honolulu always show the same clock time, since UTC+14 and UTC-10 are exactly 24 hours apart, but never the same date.

How Kiribati and Samoa moved the date line

Neither Kiritimati nor Samoa has always been first. Both used to be among the last places to see the new year, and both jumped across the date line by deleting a day from their calendars.

Kiribati’s islands are spread on both sides of the 180th meridian. Until 1995 the Gilberts were on UTC+12, while the Phoenix and Line Islands, far to the east, were on UTC-11 and UTC-10, almost a full day behind the capital. A Monday to Friday office week in Kiritimati overlapped Tarawa’s on only four days. The tz database records the fix: on the switch, the Line Islands went from UTC-10 straight to UTC+14 and the Phoenix Islands from UTC-11 to UTC+13, so the date Saturday, December 31, 1994 never happened there. The country went into 1995 on one date, and mapmakers redrew the date line around Kiribati’s eastern boundary.

Samoa did the same in 2011, moving to the west side of the line. The country went from Thursday, December 29 straight to Saturday, December 31, 2011, skipping Friday, December 30. Tokelau, a New Zealand territory, made the same change at the same moment. The full story of why the line bends around these islands is in our guide to the International Date Line.

New Year by city

This table gives the moment each city reaches midnight on January 1, 2027, in UTC and in New York time. Offsets are for that date, including daylight saving time in the Southern Hemisphere, and were checked against tz database 2026e.

Two details in the table catch people out. Sydney is on UTC+11, not its usual UTC+10, because New Year falls in the Australian summer; Brisbane, which has no daylight saving time, celebrates an hour later than Sydney even though it is further north on the same coast. And India’s half-hour offset puts New Delhi’s midnight at half past the hour everywhere on whole-hour zones. Nepal, on UTC+5:45, lands at a quarter past.

For the logic behind offsets like these, see how time zones work.

Watch midnight around the world

If you want to follow the wave on December 31, a little setup beats doing the arithmetic on the night:

1. Add the cities you care about to the world clock: for example Auckland, Sydney, Tokyo, London and your own city. Each row shows local time and date, so you see who has already crossed into the new year.
2. For a countdown to someone else’s midnight, convert it first. Our countdown counts to a time in your own zone, so find Auckland’s midnight in your time with the time zone converter (6:00 a.m. on December 31 in New York, 3:00 a.m. in Los Angeles) and count down to that.
3. To call family abroad at their midnight, set an alarm 10 minutes before the converted time, not the local one.

The countdown guide covers sharing and naming countdowns in more detail: how to count down to any date. For this year, the simplest next step is to put Kiritimati’s first midnight in your calendar now: 10:00 UTC on Thursday, December 31.

Frequently asked questions