Counting every standard UTC offset used on a country’s territory, including overseas departments and dependent territories but leaving out Antarctic claims, 22 countries have more than one time zone. France leads with 12 offsets, from UTC−10:00 in Tahiti to UTC+12:00 in Wallis and Futuna; Russia and the United States follow with 11 each, then Australia and the United Kingdom with 9, Canada and New Zealand with 5, and Brazil, Denmark and Mexico with 4. Change the counting rule and the totals change with it, so the rule comes first below.
Three Counting Rules Behind the Number 22
A time zone, for this purpose, is a standard offset from Coordinated Universal Time that a government applies to part of its territory. Three decisions shape every ranking of countries by time zones, and most disagreements between published lists come from making them differently.
The first is whether to count offsets or named zones. The United States legally recognises nine standard time zones, regulated by the Department of Transportation: Atlantic, Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, Alaska, Hawaii–Aleutian, Samoa and Chamorro. Uninhabited Pacific islands outside those statutory zones add two more offsets, Baker and Howland islands at UTC−12:00 and Wake Island at UTC+12:00, which is how the same country can be credited with 9 or 11.
The second is whether overseas territories count. Wikipedia’s list of time zones by country, the source used throughout this guide, includes dependent territories, so the United Kingdom collects offsets from the Pitcairn Islands to the British Indian Ocean Territory, and Denmark collects them from Greenland and the Faroe Islands. Count only a country’s main landmass and the order changes completely: Russia, with 11 zones stretching from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka, becomes the clear leader, and France drops to one.
The third is Antarctica. France would have 13 offsets if its claim to Adélie Land were included, and the research stations on the continent use at least ten different times between them, from UTC−03:00 at Palmer and Rothera to UTC+12:00 at McMurdo and the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station. Because no country’s Antarctic claim is generally recognised, those are left out here.
The 22 Countries on the List
Those rules produce the ranking below, with tied countries listed alphabetically.
| Rank | Country | Offsets | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | France | 12 | UTC−10 to UTC+12 |
| 2= | Russia | 11 | UTC+2 to UTC+12 |
| 2= | United States | 11 | UTC−12 to UTC+12 |
| 4= | Australia | 9 | UTC+5 to UTC+11 |
| 4= | United Kingdom | 9 | UTC−8 to UTC+6 |
| 6= | Canada | 5 | UTC−7 to UTC−3:30 |
| 6= | New Zealand | 5 | UTC−11 to UTC+13 |
| 8= | Brazil | 4 | UTC−5 to UTC−2 |
| 8= | Denmark | 4 | UTC−4 to UTC+1 |
| 8= | Mexico | 4 | UTC−8 to UTC−5 |
Below the top ten, Chile, Indonesia and Kiribati have three offsets each. Nine countries have exactly two: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Mongolia, Papua New Guinea, Portugal, South Africa and Spain.
France’s 12 Offsets, from the Marquesas to New Caledonia
Metropolitan France runs on Central European Time, UTC+01:00. Everything else comes from territory scattered across three oceans. French Polynesia alone supplies three offsets: UTC−10:00 for the Society Islands, Tuamotus and Austral Islands, UTC−09:30 for the Marquesas Islands, and UTC−09:00 for the Gambier Islands. Uninhabited Clipperton Island in the eastern Pacific sits at UTC−08:00.
In the Atlantic and Caribbean, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint Barthélemy and Saint Martin use UTC−04:00, while French Guiana and Saint Pierre and Miquelon use UTC−03:00. The Indian Ocean adds three more: UTC+03:00 for Mayotte and the Scattered Islands, UTC+04:00 for Réunion and the Crozet Islands, and UTC+05:00 for the Kerguelen Islands and the Saint Paul and Amsterdam islands. New Caledonia uses UTC+11:00 and Wallis and Futuna UTC+12:00.
The spread is 22 hours from end to end. When it is noon in Papeete, it is already 10 a.m. the next day in Mata-Utu, capital of Wallis and Futuna.
Russia and the United States: Two Ways to Reach 11
Russia’s 11 zones all lie on one continuous stretch of land plus the Kaliningrad exclave, running from UTC+02:00 in Kaliningrad Oblast to UTC+12:00 in Chukotka and Kamchatka Krai. Moscow Time, UTC+03:00, covers most of European Russia and about 63% of the population.
The count has not always been 11. On 28 March 2010 Russia abolished two zones, moving Udmurtia and Samara Oblast onto Moscow Time and putting Chukotka and Kamchatka on Magadan Time. Far-eastern residents objected, and a petition of about 20,000 people backed Kamchatka’s return to UTC+12:00. From 27 March 2011 the country stayed on permanent summer time. A law passed in July 2014 took effect on 26 October 2014: most of Russia moved back an hour, Samara Time and Kamchatka Time were reinstated, and the total returned to 11. Seasonal clock changes have not been used since. The full regional detail is in our guide to Russia’s 11 time zones.
The United States gets to the same number by another route. The contiguous 48 states use four zones, Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific, which date from noon on 18 November 1883, when railroads introduced standard time and telegraph lines carried the signal from Chicago. The Standard Time Act of 1918, also called the Calder Act, put zones into federal law. Alaska and Hawaii add UTC−09:00 and UTC−10:00; Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands use UTC−04:00; Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands use UTC+10:00; American Samoa uses UTC−11:00. The last two offsets belong to islands with no permanent population, Baker and Howland at UTC−12:00 and Wake Island at UTC+12:00.
Australia’s Nine Offsets and the Broken Hill Exception
Mainland Australia has three official zones: Australian Western Standard Time (UTC+08:00), Australian Central Standard Time (UTC+09:30) and Australian Eastern Standard Time (UTC+10:00). Sir Charles Todd had proposed a single national time based on the 135th meridian at the 1891 Intercolonial Postal Conference; a plan for three hourly zones from Queensland’s W. H. Wilson won support at the 1893 conference, and the laws took effect in February 1895. The central zone was originally a whole nine hours ahead of GMT; it is now a half-hour offset.
The town of Broken Hill, strictly the county of Yancowinna in far-western New South Wales, took Central time rather than its own state’s Eastern time because in 1895 it was linked by rail to Adelaide but not to Sydney. It still uses South Australian time today.
The other six offsets come from external territories, Lord Howe Island and one unofficial band. Heard and McDonald Islands sit at UTC+05:00, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands at UTC+06:30, Christmas Island at UTC+07:00, Norfolk Island at UTC+11:00, and Lord Howe Island, part of New South Wales, at UTC+10:30. The ninth is Central Western Time, UTC+08:45, which has no official sanction but is observed by roughly 200 people along the Eyre Highway east of Caiguna, including Eucla, Cocklebiddy, Madura, Mundrabilla and Border Village just over the South Australian line. Daylight saving complicates things further in summer, since New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, the ACT and South Australia move their clocks while Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia do not. Our Australia time zones guide covers the seasonal changes state by state.
Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia and Kiribati
These countries earn their place mainly through mainland width rather than distant islands. Canada counts five zones, Mountain, Central, Eastern, Atlantic and Newfoundland; Newfoundland and south-eastern Labrador use UTC−03:30, one of the few half-hour offsets in the Americas.
Brazil has four: Acre time (UTC−05:00), Amazon time (UTC−04:00), Brasília time (UTC−03:00) and Fernando de Noronha time (UTC−02:00) for its Atlantic islands. About 93% of Brazilians live on Brasília time. The Acre zone was abolished in June 2008 and restored on 10 November 2013, after voters in a non-binding referendum on 31 October 2010 narrowly backed a return. Mexico also has four, from UTC−08:00 in Baja California to UTC−05:00 in Quintana Roo.
Indonesia’s three zones, in their present form since 1 January 1988, are Western Indonesia Time (UTC+07:00) for Sumatra, Java and western Kalimantan, Central Indonesia Time (UTC+08:00) for Bali, Sulawesi and the Lesser Sunda Islands, and Eastern Indonesia Time (UTC+09:00) for Maluku and Western New Guinea. About 80% of Indonesians live in the western zone.
Kiribati has only three zones, but their history is the strangest on the list. At independence in 1979 the Gilbert Islands used UTC+12:00 while the Phoenix and Line Islands used UTC−11:00 and UTC−10:00, so the two halves of the country were almost a full day apart. On 31 December 1994 the eastern islands switched to UTC+13:00 and UTC+14:00, offsets that had not existed before, and the International Date Line was bent far to the east around them. The Line Islands are now on the most advanced time on Earth; the reasons for that kink are set out in our explainer on the International Date Line.
The remaining multi-zone members tend to have one outlying region on a different clock. New Zealand uses UTC+12:00 at home and UTC+12:45 on the Chatham Islands, and the list also counts Niue, the Cook Islands and Tokelau. Chile runs Easter Island at UTC−06:00 and its far-southern Aysén and Magallanes regions at UTC−03:00. Ecuador puts Galápagos Province an hour behind the mainland; Portugal does the same for the Azores, Spain for the Canary Islands, and the Netherlands keeps its Caribbean islands at UTC−04:00. Mongolia sets its three western provinces, Khovd, Uvs and Bayan-Ölgii, an hour behind Ulaanbaatar, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo splits between UTC+01:00 in Kinshasa and UTC+02:00 in the east.
Wide Countries Left Off: China, India and Kazakhstan
Size alone does not put a country on the list. China crosses about five geographical time zones yet officially uses only Beijing Time, UTC+08:00. Five zones were proposed in 1918 and partly used before 1949, when every regional government except Xinjiang’s and Tibet’s adopted the Beijing standard. In Xinjiang, Ürümqi Time (UTC+06:00) still runs alongside the official standard, but it is unofficial and so does not count. Our piece on China’s single time zone looks at how one clock works across the whole country.
India keeps a single offset, Indian Standard Time at UTC+05:30, across the whole country. Kazakhstan, whose eastern and western extremes differ by 2 hours 43 minutes of solar time, moved to one zone, UTC+05:00, on 1 March 2024.
Spain shows the opposite effect: it qualifies only because of the Canary Islands. Mainland Spain kept Greenwich Mean Time until the Second World War but has used Central European Time since 1940, an hour ahead of Portugal and the United Kingdom, while the Canaries keep Western European Time. Membership of the multi-zone club says more about where a country owns islands and how its governments have chosen to set the clock than about how far it stretches from east to west.