UTC offsets kept by exactly one zone
At this instant the world is reading 37 different UTC offsets, and 9 of them belong to exactly one zone apiece. The busiest, UTC+1, carries 48 zones on its own.
Computed at 5 November 2026 at 11:54 UTC. Offsets are read at the instant of the request and daylight saving reshuffles this list twice a year: a zone can be alone on an offset in January and share it with a dozen others in July.
The offsets nobody else keeps
| # | Offset | The only zone on it | Anchor place | Cities |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | UTC-9:30 | Pacific/Marquesas | Papeete, French Polynesia | 0 |
| 2 | UTC-3:30 | America/St_Johns | St. John's, Canada | 1 |
| 3 | UTC+3:30 | Asia/Tehran | Tehran, Iran | 104 |
| 4 | UTC+4:30 | Asia/Kabul | Kabul, Afghanistan | 11 |
| 5 | UTC+5:45 | Asia/Kathmandu | Kathmandu, Nepal | 15 |
| 6 | UTC+8:45 | Australia/Eucla | Canberra, Australia | 0 |
| 7 | UTC+9:30 | Australia/Darwin | Darwin, Australia | 1 |
| 8 | UTC+13:45 | Pacific/Chatham | Wellington, New Zealand | 0 |
| 9 | UTC+14 | Pacific/Kiritimati | South Tarawa, Kiribati | 0 |
How the loneliness was counted
Every one of the 419 zone identifiers we publish was asked for its current offset, the zones were grouped by the answer, and any group containing exactly one zone is listed above. The grouping is done on the offset in minutes, so a half hour or a quarter hour offset is its own group rather than being rounded into a neighbouring one.
This is one of the few rankings on the site where daylight saving can change the answer wholesale rather than by a rank or two. An offset that is crowded in the northern summer can empty out in the northern winter, and the reverse. UTC+14 is permanently alone because nothing else on Earth is that far forward, but several entries above are alone only for part of the year.
Nothing here depends on the city catalogue, which is why this page carries no population caveat: it is computed against the complete set of zone identifiers we publish, which covers the whole inhabited world. The city column is supplementary, and where it reads zero it means the zone's population is below our hundred thousand floor, not that nobody lives there.
UTC+14: the clock that gets tomorrow first
UTC+14 belongs to Pacific/Kiritimati alone, and it is the furthest forward clock on Earth: when it is midnight there, the day has not started anywhere else. Kiribati put it there deliberately. The country straddles the date line, and until 1994 it was split by it, so the government's eastern islands were a full day behind its western ones and had four working days a week in common. On 1 January 1995 Kiribati moved the line east around its entire territory, which created the UTC+14 offset and eliminated a genuinely awkward administrative problem in a single stroke.
A side effect was that the Line Islands became the first inhabited place on Earth to reach each new date, which was worth a considerable amount of attention five years later at the millennium. The total spread on this page, 25 hours from UTC-11 to UTC+14, is greater than a day for exactly this reason: the date line is not a meridian, and both ends of it have been stretched by countries that preferred to be on one side of it.
The other end, and the ones in between
UTC-11 is the furthest behind, and the gap between it and UTC+14 means there are always at least two and often three calendar dates in force somewhere on Earth. In between, the solo offsets are mostly the fractional ones: a country that chose a half or quarter hour has, almost by definition, chosen something nobody else picked. That is the same population the 45 minute page and the half hour page cover from the other direction.
The rarity is worth stating plainly, because it is the opposite of how time zones are usually taught. The picture of 24 neat hourly bands is wrong in both directions at once: there are more offsets than 24, several of them are not whole hours, and the number in force changes through the year as clocks move. Right now the count is 37.
Questions about this ranking
- What is the furthest forward time zone in the world?
- UTC+14, kept by Pacific/Kiritimati and by nothing else. It reaches each new calendar date before anywhere else on Earth.
- How many UTC offsets are there?
- 37 in force at the instant this page was built, not 24. The number moves through the year as zones change clocks, and several of the offsets are not whole hours.
- Why did Kiribati create UTC+14?
- To put its whole territory on one side of the date line. Before 1995 the country was split across it, so its eastern and western islands shared only four working days a week.
- Can an offset stop being solo?
- Yes. Daylight saving moves zones between offsets twice a year, so a zone alone on an offset in one season can have company in the other. Only UTC+14 is structurally alone.