Time zone · Europe
BST
British Summer Time
British Summer Time is the United Kingdom’s daylight-saving advance on standard Greenwich clocks, centred on London and running one hour ahead of UTC until it falls back in late October.
Thursday, October 15, 2026
Current offset
UTC+01:00
Daylight · BST
Daylight saving
Active
Reverts 25 Oct 2026
IANA zones
1
1 observe DST, 0 don't
DST offset
—
No summer variant
About BST
Standard time, with a summer shift.
British Summer Time is the United Kingdom’s daylight-saving advance on standard Greenwich clocks, centred on London and running one hour ahead of UTC until it falls back in late October.
IANA zones · the technical identifiers
The zone that resolve to BST.
For software, always store the IANA identifier — never the abbreviation alone. The database keeps these zones distinct because their rules can, and historically did, diverge.
Cities across BST
Local time, city by city.
10 cities
Where BST is used
One country.
Same offset · UTC+01:00
Other zones at UTC+01:00 right now.
These named zones share BST's offset today. When daylight saving rules differ, they drift apart for part of the year.
Convert
BST to the world's clocks.
Frequently asked questions
Common questions about BST, daylight saving, and how to handle it in software. Can't find what you need? Email [email protected].
- When exactly do clocks go forward in the UK?
- Clocks spring forward an hour at 1 a.m. on the last Sunday in March, switching from Greenwich Mean Time to British Summer Time.
- When exactly do clocks go back in the UK?
- Each autumn, clocks fall back at 2 a.m. on the last Sunday of October, returning to Greenwich Mean Time.
- What does BST feel like for traders in London?
- During BST, the London trading day overlaps with New York's morning session and runs one hour behind Frankfurt and Paris.
- How does BST align with Continental Europe?
- British Summer Time (UTC+01:00) stays one hour behind Central European Summer Time (UTC+02:00), just as GMT is one hour behind Central European Time in winter, so noon in London is 1 p.m. in Frankfurt and Paris.
- Does the whole UK use BST uniformly?
- Yes—all of Britain springs forward and falls back together; there are no internal exceptions to daylight saving.
- Is BST unique to the United Kingdom?
- Although the trend started from wartime UK practice, BST is used officially only in the UK and the Crown Dependencies.
- Do any British territories keep BST all year?
- No—every UK territory that uses BST also reverts to GMT in winter. The UK did keep UTC+01:00 all year from 1968 to 1971, under the name British Standard Time.
- Why was BST introduced historically?
- BST began as a wartime measure to reduce evening lighting needs and better use daylight, later formalised in peacetime law.
Source: IANA tzdb2026d · Reviewed
Free · Developer API
This time zone, as JSON.
Its defining offset, DST status and member counts, from one endpoint.
Also in the API: time zones by coordinates, conversions that flag daylight saving gaps, and abbreviations decoded.
Moving off WorldTimeAPI? Our drop-in replacement needs no key.