About Live Time Map
Live Time Map is a free tool for seeing what time it is anywhere in the world, and for working out how far apart two places are. It exists because almost every other way of answering that question gets daylight saving subtly wrong, or makes you do the arithmetic yourself at exactly the moment you can least afford a mistake.
What the site does
The centrepiece is an interactive world map coloured by each region's current offset from UTC. Because the colouring follows the offset in effect right now rather than a fixed historical boundary, the map visibly changes through the year: in northern summer, Arizona shifts into the same colour band as the Pacific coast and separates from the rest of the Mountain zone, then rejoins it in winter. Most printed time zone maps cannot show that at all.
Around the map there are three other ways in: a World Clock listing live local times for cities worldwide, a time difference section that compares two cities and works out when their business hours actually overlap, and a country index showing which zones each country's cities use.
Where the data comes from
Time zone boundaries come from the open timezone-boundary-builder project, which derives them from the IANA time zone database: the same authoritative dataset that operating systems, programming languages and phones use to decide what time to display. Map tiles and place search are provided by Mapbox.
Nothing about the clocks is hard-coded or cached on a server. Every time shown on the
site is computed in your own browser at the moment you look at it, using the
Intl date and time APIs built into the browser, which read from that same
IANA database. That is why the site stays correct across daylight saving transitions
without anyone needing to update it: when a country changes its rules, the fix arrives
through your browser and operating system, not through us.
Why time zones are messier than they look
A time zone is not simply a slice of longitude. In the IANA database a zone is a region whose clocks have agreed on everything, including daylight saving rules, since 1970. Two neighbouring places that show the same time today can still be separate zones because they diverged at some point in the past, which is why the United States has far more zone identifiers than it has visible bands on a map.
Offsets are not all whole hours either. India runs at UTC+5:30, Nepal at UTC+5:45, and parts of Australia at UTC+9:30, which is precisely the kind of detail that breaks hand-rolled "just add or subtract hours" calculations. Every figure on this site is computed from the real offset, so half-hour and quarter-hour zones are handled correctly rather than rounded away.
What it does not do
This is a reference and planning tool, not an authoritative legal source. The underlying data is excellent, but governments sometimes change their clocks at short notice and it takes time for those changes to flow through the IANA database into browsers. For anything where being wrong carries a real cost, such as catching a flight, meeting a legal deadline or administering medication, confirm against an official source for that country.
City populations and elevations shown on city pages are approximate reference figures intended to give a sense of scale, not precise census data.
Who runs it
Live Time Map is an independently built and maintained side project, not a company. It is free to use, needs no account, and stores your pinned cities only in your own browser. Running it costs money (domain, map tiles, hosting), which is why you may see ads; how that works and what you can control is explained in the privacy policy.
Corrections are genuinely welcome, especially if you spot a city filed under the wrong zone or a figure that looks off. The contact page explains how to reach me.