raatools/

⏱️ Time & Date

Reloj mundial, conversor de zonas horarias, calculadora de fechas, temporizador

Time zones, date arithmetic, elapsed durations and countdowns — the calculations that are easy to get subtly wrong by hand because calendars refuse to behave arithmetically.

Time zone work in particular is worth doing with a tool. Offsets shift with daylight saving, the shift dates differ by country, and the answer you want is usually "what time is it there when it is this time here", which is two conversions rather than one.

Which tool do I want?

If you…Use
You are scheduling across countriesConversor de zonas horarias
You need days between dates, or a date N days outCalculadora de fechas
You are adding or subtracting hours and minutesCalculadora de tiempo
You want time remaining until an eventTemporizador de cuenta regresiva

The offset is a property of the date, not the place

"New York is UTC−5" is true in January and wrong in July, when it is UTC−4. Scheduling a recurring call by fixed offset works until one side changes clocks and the other has not yet — and because the EU and US switch on different weekends, there are a couple of weeks each year when the usual gap between London and New York is off by an hour.

The reliable approach is to store the zone name rather than the offset: Europe/Oslo, not UTC+2. The zone name plus a date determines the offset; an offset alone determines nothing.

Then there are the edges. Not every zone is a whole hour off — India is UTC+5:30, Nepal UTC+5:45. Some places skip a day: when Samoa crossed the date line in 2011, 30 December simply did not exist. And on a spring-forward day one local hour never happens, so a meeting set for 02:30 that morning is a time with no instant attached to it.