Why Nepal Is UTC+5:45 (and the World's Other Odd Time Offsets)

Nepal: the 15 minutes that make it unique

Nepal Time is UTC+5:45. That puts Kathmandu exactly 15 minutes ahead of New Delhi and 15 minutes behind Dhaka, and it makes Nepal the only country in the world on this offset. When it is 9:00 AM in India, it is 9:15 AM in Nepal.

The convenient thing for anyone who works with Nepal is that the difference to India is constant. Neither country observes daylight saving time, so the 15-minute gap is the same on every day of the year. The inconvenient part is that many calendars, spreadsheets and booking systems are built around whole and half hours, and the extra 15 minutes catches people out. A meeting at "3:30 PM Nepal time" is 3:15 PM in India, a mismatch small enough to slip past a quick mental check. Use the IST time now page and add 15 minutes for the Kathmandu equivalent.

Where the number comes from

Until 1986, Nepal ran on UTC+5:30 like its large neighbour. On January 1, 1986 the country moved its clocks forward by 15 minutes and adopted UTC+5:45. The commonly cited reasoning is that UTC+5:45 matches the meridian at about 86°15′ East, which runs close to Mount Gaurishankar, a peak in the Rolwaling Himalaya on the border between Nepal and Tibet. Choosing a time keyed to a Nepali landmark gave the country a standard that belonged to Nepal rather than to India.

The solar reasoning is plausible too. Kathmandu is at roughly 85°19′ East, and a clock set to the sun at that longitude would read about UTC+5:41, a little under 5:45. India's 5:30 is set to 82°30′ East, so Kathmandu's local solar time was already well ahead of the clock it used. A change of 15 minutes brought official time much closer to the sun in the capital. It is also widely reported that the change served as an assertion of independence from India, though the government's own explanation was framed in terms of the national meridian.

One caution: sources describe the mountain link a little differently. Gaurishankar stands at about 86°20′ East, a few minutes of arc from the 86°15′ line, so "near" is the accurate word. The firm facts are the date and the offset; the Gaurishankar meridian is the explanation most often given for it.

Why half-hour and quarter-hour zones exist at all

Time zones started as local solar time. Before railways, every town set its clocks by the sun, and noon in one city differed from noon in another by minutes. The 1884 International Meridian Conference set Greenwich as the prime meridian, and in the decades afterwards countries adopted standard times that were multiples of an hour from Greenwich. Many countries did not choose the nearest hour. They chose the meridian that suited their geography, railways or politics, and where that meridian lay between two hourly lines, the clock offset ended up as a fraction of an hour.

The reasons fall into a few groups:

• Solar fit: A country wide enough to straddle two zones may pick the middle. India's 82°30′ E meridian, close to Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh, gave the entire country one time that is UTC+5:30. The full story of why India has one time zone explains why this lasts.
• Distinct national identity: Nepal, as above, and Myanmar, whose UTC+6:30 differs from both India and Thailand.
• Splitting the difference between neighbours: Afghanistan at UTC+4:30 sits between Pakistan (UTC+5) and Iran (UTC+3:30) and Central Asia.
• Political history: Newfoundland's 30-minute offset has its roots in the days when it was a separate dominion, before it joined Canada in 1949.

Today there are about a dozen standard offsets that are not whole hours. They cover well over a billion people, mostly because India is one of them.

The odd offsets in one table

These are the offsets you are most likely to meet. Each is verified against the IANA time zone database that your phone and browser use, shown for standard time.

The table also shows why simple rules of thumb fail: some of these places observe daylight saving time (Chatham, Newfoundland) and some do not (Nepal, Afghanistan, Myanmar, India), so a "plus 15 minutes" shortcut that works for one zone does not carry over to another.

Half-hour zones: India, Iran, Afghanistan, Myanmar and Newfoundland

India (UTC+5:30)

India has used a single time since 1906 for railways and 1947 as a whole. See our guide to the IST to GMT relationship for what 5:30 means in practice. The half-hour offset is a compromise that sits at the centre of the country's longitude range, and it also applies in Sri Lanka.

Iran (UTC+3:30)

Tehran sits near 51°E, so UTC+3:30 is close to the sun. Iran used daylight saving time for decades, with a pause and several restarts, and in 2022 it passed a law that abolished it. Iran is therefore on UTC+3:30 all year, and its gap to Europe and the Gulf is now stable.

Afghanistan (UTC+4:30)

Afghanistan has used UTC+4:30 since the 1950s. Kabul is at about 69°E, which would give UTC+4:36 in solar terms, so the clock and the sun are within a few minutes of each other. Afghanistan is the only country on that offset.

Myanmar (UTC+6:30)

UTC+6:30 has been Myanmar's standard time for most of the past century, interrupted only by the Second World War. It puts the country between India and Thailand on the clock. The Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the Indian Ocean also use UTC+6:30.

Newfoundland (UTC-3:30)

The island of Newfoundland, along with a small part of southeastern Labrador, sits on Newfoundland Standard Time, UTC-3:30 in winter and UTC-2:30 in summer, since the province observes daylight saving time on the North American schedule. The rest of Labrador follows Atlantic Time. St. John's is therefore the one major North American city that is a half hour out of step with the rest of the continent.

Quarter-hour zones: Nepal, Chatham and Eucla

The Chatham Islands are a remote New Zealand territory about 800 km east of the mainland, with fewer than a thousand residents. They run 45 minutes ahead of New Zealand's main islands: UTC+12:45 in winter and UTC+13:45 in summer, when they follow New Zealand's daylight saving schedule. The islands sit just west of the International Date Line, so each new day arrives there well before it reaches mainland New Zealand. You can check mainland New Zealand time on the NZST time now page and add 45 minutes.

Eucla is the stranger case. It is a tiny community near the South Australian border on the Nullarbor Plain, in Western Australia, and it and a few neighbouring roadhouses use an unofficial UTC+8:45 time. Western Australia officially sits at UTC+8, and South Australia at UTC+9:30; the 8:45 time is a local compromise between the two, so travellers on the Eyre Highway find roadhouse clocks 45 minutes ahead of Perth. It has no daylight saving and appears in the IANA database as Australia/Eucla. For the rest of Australia's time zones, see our guide to daylight saving in Australia.

When governments change their minds: Venezuela and North Korea

Odd offsets are not necessarily permanent. In December 2007, Venezuela moved its clocks back 30 minutes from UTC-4 to UTC-4:30. The government said the change would give children more morning daylight and a better start to the school day. In May 2016, during an energy crisis, Venezuela moved the clocks forward again by 30 minutes, returning to UTC-4 to make better use of evening daylight and reduce electricity demand.

North Korea did something similar for political reasons. In August 2015 it introduced "Pyongyang Time", UTC+8:30, to mark 70 years since liberation from Japanese rule and to break with the UTC+9 time shared with Japan and South Korea. In May 2018, shortly after an inter-Korean summit, it returned to UTC+9. For a few years, then, the Korean peninsula was split by 30 minutes.

These cases are a reminder that time zone databases, including the one that powers this site, are updated several times a year as governments announce changes. Often those changes are announced with very little notice.

Jumping the date line: Kiribati and Samoa

Some changes are not 15 or 30 minutes but a whole day. Kiribati moved its Line Islands from UTC-10 to UTC+14 on January 1, 1995, so that the whole country shares one calendar date, and Kiritimati is now among the first places to see each new day. Samoa moved from UTC-11 to UTC+13 and went straight from Thursday, December 29 to Saturday, December 31, 2011. Both stories, along with how three dates can exist at once, are told in detail in our international date line guide, so we will not repeat them here. The point for this article is simply that a country's offset is a political choice and can be changed.

What this means for scheduling

If you work with Nepal, add 15 minutes to Indian time and write both in invites. If you work with Newfoundland, remember that there are two moving parts: its own 30-minute offset and North American daylight saving. If you work with Chatham, remember it is 45 minutes ahead of New Zealand and changes on New Zealand's schedule.

Write the offset, not only the abbreviation. Abbreviations such as "NST" are ambiguous: it is used for Newfoundland Standard Time and also for Nepal Standard Time. For distributed teams, converting once with a tool that uses the real IANA time zone rules is safer than doing the arithmetic in your head. The IST to GMT converter shows the principle for India, and the same approach works for any offset on this page.

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