Meeting Planner Across Time Zones

Start with working hours, then choose the meeting time

A time zone converter answers “what time is it there?” A meeting planner helps you find a time that fits several schedules. Enter the hours people actually want to meet, which may be narrower than their full working day. Someone with a school run or a late support shift should not inherit a default nine-to-five schedule.

Choose a duration before selecting a start. If London finishes at 17:00, a one-hour meeting can start at 16:00, but not at 16:30. The planner checks every minute of the meeting, so a start inside a working period is not enough by itself.

A weekly meeting can move for one team

Consider a Wednesday meeting fixed at 09:00 in New York. The US daylight saving schedule and the UK clock-change schedule do not align in March 2026. The resulting local times are:

The US change on March 8 moves the London meeting one hour earlier. The UK change on March 29 restores London’s 14:00 start. Kolkata’s reading stays at 18:30 after the New York change. These are conversions for this example, not a rule that every place changes together.

Try this three-location example →

The example gives the India participant a 13:00–21:00 work window to make the evening overlap explicit. With a 09:00–17:00 window instead, this meeting would not fit. Do not treat a convenient conversion as agreement to meet outside someone’s hours.

Which city should anchor a recurring meeting?

Choose the person whose local time should stay fixed as the organizer. A weekly call anchored to New York at 09:00 may shift for London when one country changes its clocks first. A call fixed at 14:00 UTC makes a different promise: the UTC instant stays constant, while local times can move wherever offsets change.

The four-week preview uses the first participant’s named zone and preserves their local start time. A warning appears if an occurrence falls outside another participant’s work window. Recheck a longer series around later seasonal changes; four matching weeks do not establish that a year-long series will fit.

The downloaded file describes one meeting with exact UTC start and end instants, following the iCalendar format. If you create a repeating event in your calendar app, choose the intended organizer time zone there and review its recurrence settings.

Check the date as well as the hour

An afternoon in Los Angeles can already be the following morning in Sydney. That changes which working weekday applies. This planner evaluates each person’s own local date rather than assuming everyone shares the organizer’s Monday or Friday.

For overnight work, the selected weekday is the shift’s start day. A Monday 22:00–06:00 shift includes early Tuesday morning. Tuesday’s checkbox controls the next shift starting on Tuesday evening. Start and end times must differ. The tool supports one work window per person, including overnight shifts; 24-hour shifts and split shifts are not supported.

What if there is no shared slot?

First check the date, selected weekdays, and duration. A 30-minute opening cannot hold a 60-minute meeting. A weekend for one participant can remove an otherwise familiar overlap. The working-hours bars help reveal which schedules do not intersect.

If no reasonable slot exists, discuss a shorter call, alternate attendance, or written updates. For a necessary call outside ordinary hours, agree on the exception before widening that person’s work window. For a recurring meeting, rotating the inconvenient slot can distribute the burden more fairly.

How the planner handles clock changes

The planner uses named IANA zones through your browser’s time-zone data. The IANA database changes when governments change time rules, and browser or operating-system updates deliver those rules. Predictions for distant dates can change with future decisions.

Suggested starts fall on the organizer’s quarter-hours. Availability is checked minute by minute using real instants, and duration means elapsed minutes. A skipped spring clock reading is never offered. If a fall clock change repeats a start time, both occurrences can appear with different UTC offsets. The weekly preview flags a missing or ambiguous organizer time for you to resolve.

Availability is based on the hours and weekdays you enter. Confirm appointments, leave, lunch breaks, and holidays separately; the business days calculator can help inspect holiday-adjusted date ranges. See our methodology or report a calculation problem with the date and selected zones.

Sources checked September 30, 2026: NIST daylight saving rules, GOV.UK clock-change dates, the IANA Time Zone Database, and RFC 5545, linked above. Worked examples are calculated for the stated dates.