It is About Time


CheckTimes.com lunched on November 19th 2013 at 8:10 PM PST.

We offer a searchable worldwide directory with the date and time at each location, including: the timezone, any DST offsets in observance and a calendar of when they start and end. You will discover the UTC offset in hours and seconds, general regional information, and an amazingly quick and convenient way to figure out the time difference from the current location's page - just by using a marker on a map along with your preferred screen interaction dissemination utensil (i.e. your mouse, finger, stylus, etc...)

As simple as our service is, and we know it is, we believe it will provide the exact information you are looking for in a "Timely" manner (pun shamelessly intended) without diluting your experience with a bunch of other needless "data" or trying to divert you to something unrelated like rental cars, cheapest hotels, or an amazing offer for the best competitive airfare rates we can drum up.

We have built this website to be easy and quick to use, as well as offer it up by utilizing the latest in "responsive" layout and design technology; meaning that it will automatically fit to your device without reloading the page and provide the same information as on a desktop experience.

Displaying the time is a tricky business. There are 44 UTC timezones across the world, but not all are created equal and it doesn't stop there... they can be intertwined based on who "owns" what and named differently. Some countries, states, counties and even cities will associate their time zone based on many factors, including political interests or convenience. Then there is Daylight Saving Time, don't even get us started on that subject. There are regions that call that something different too. Some regions observe it, some don't, some that do but keep changing when it goes into effect, and then other countries that decide they will, but only for a year or two and then completely abolish the practice. Even here in the US, we changed observance dates in 2007, all while some states or cities don't even bother with it. The usual offset is 1 hour from standard time, but there are areas of the world that instead offset their clocks by 30 minutes or by 45 minutes, and there are instances where the DST is changed based on a local time, like 2am or synced all at once based on UTC offset.

All this to say, each location we have in our directory has been carefully verified to ensure the proper timezone conversion happens and is displayed, based on offset from UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), or GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) for those who may recognize that better.

As Wikipedia states here: "Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time. It is one of several closely related successors to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). For most purposes, UTC is synonymous with GMT, but GMT is no longer precisely defined by the scientific community."

We did a lot of research and testing to ensure we provide current, correct, and accurate data, but our algorithms are mostly built around a special blend of GNU and public domain information that came from many resources on the subject of time keeping, timezones, and geospatial data - each compliled a long time before us and with a large community behind these industry subsets.

We thank them all, but mostly, we would like to recognize Arthur David Olson for his admirable dedication over many years, having been the founding contributor of and maintaining what is called "tz database" or his nameake "Olson Database", and Paul Eggert of IANA for creating the naming conventions for the 400+ timezone names (e.g. America/Los_Angeles, Europe/London, etc..) that make it possible to associate a timezone for many regions at once, while being able to convert time from UTC very quickly, as well as his continued work on the "Olson database". These men have dedicated countless hours in keeping up-to-date and historical records of Timezones and deserve more praise than they probably never truly receive. It is mainly because of them that websites, apps, databases, and most programming languages and operating systems are able to convienently offer accurate time and zone attribution and conversions.

We would also like to credit and thank Geonames for their hard work on creating and consistently maintaining ridiculously extensive databases of the entire world, which helped us tie this all together!


As we grow, we hope you will come to find that we are a reliable resource to accurately check times and compare them with other areas of the world.

Thank you for visiting!

Check Time In A City:
This will search for cities in all countries in the directory.