How to Find the Best Meeting Time Across Time Zones

Scheduling a call with teammates in another country sounds simple until you realize that 3 p.m. for you might be 6 a.m. for someone else. The good news is that finding a fair, workable meeting time is mostly a matter of a few clear steps. This guide walks through how to think about time zones, find the overlap in everyone's day, and handle the tricky cases like daylight saving and half-hour offsets.

Think in UTC Offsets First

Every time zone can be described as an offset from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). New York in winter is UTC-5, London is UTC+0, and Tokyo is UTC+9. Instead of juggling city names, translate each person's location into an offset. The difference between two offsets tells you how many hours apart people are.

For example, if one teammate is at UTC-5 and another is at UTC+1, they are six hours apart. Whenever it is noon for the first person, it is 6 p.m. for the second. Once you know the gap, you can slide a proposed time back and forth and instantly see what it becomes for everyone.

Find the Overlap of Working Hours

The heart of the problem is overlap. Write down each person's normal working window, say 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and convert those windows to a shared reference like UTC. The hours where all the windows intersect are your candidate meeting times.

A quick way to do this by hand:

Convert everyone's start and end of day to UTC.
Take the latest start time and the earliest end time.
The span between those two is your overlap. If it is empty, there is no shared working hour and you'll need to compromise.

Aim to place the meeting near the middle of the overlap so no one is squeezed against the edge of their day.

Handle Daylight Saving and Half-Hour Zones

Two things trip people up. The first is daylight saving time. Many regions shift their clocks forward in spring and back in fall, but they don't all do it on the same date, and some places don't observe it at all. A gap that is five hours in January might be four hours in July. Always check the offset for the actual date of the meeting, not today's offset.

The second surprise is that not every zone lands on a whole hour. India is UTC+5:30, and parts of Australia use UTC+9:30. A few places even use 45-minute offsets. When you convert working hours, keep those half-hour and quarter-hour shifts in the math or you'll be off by exactly that amount.

Be Fair When Overlap Is Small

Sometimes the honest answer is that there is almost no comfortable overlap, especially across very distant zones. In that case, fairness matters more than convenience. A few practical habits help:

Rotate the pain. If one call has to be early for someone, make the next one early for a different person.
Cap the discomfort. Avoid asking anyone to join outside a reasonable window, and never make the same person take a 6 a.m. call every week.
Record and summarize. When a live meeting genuinely can't be fair, share notes or a recording so people in the worst slot can catch up asynchronously.

Naming the tradeoff out loud goes a long way. People are far more willing to take an occasional early call when they can see the schedule is shared evenly.

A Worked Example: New York and London

Suppose you're in New York (UTC-4 in summer) and a colleague is in London (UTC+1 in summer). That's a five-hour gap. Your teammate is ahead of you.

Your working day of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. New York time lines up with 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. in London. Their day of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. London time is 4 a.m. to noon your time. The overlap where both of you are at work is 9 a.m. to noon in New York, which is 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. in London.

The middle of that window, around 10:30 a.m. in New York and 3:30 p.m. in London, is a comfortable slot for both of you. Notice how the summer offsets already changed the math from the winter case, which is exactly why you check the date.

Let a Planner Do the Math

Doing this by hand is fine for two people, but it gets fiddly fast with three or four locations and shifting daylight saving dates. A tool can convert everyone at once and highlight the overlap for you. Try our time zone meeting planner to add each participant, see everyone's local time side by side, and pick a slot that works for the whole team.