CET to IST

About Central European Time

Central European Time covers most of the continent, from Spain to Poland, at UTC+1 as CET and UTC+2 as CEST. Every EU country changes at the same instant — 01:00 UTC on the last Sunday of March and of October — rather than at 02:00 local like North America, so the whole bloc moves together and the steps between European zones never wobble.

Cities on this clock: Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Rome, Amsterdam, Brussels, Vienna, Warsaw.

About India Standard Time

India keeps one clock, UTC+5:30, across a country spanning about 29 degrees of longitude — the sun rises nearly two hours earlier in Arunachal Pradesh than in Gujarat on the same clock. The half-hour offset means most conversions from India land on the half hour rather than the hour. Sri Lanka keeps the same time.

Cities on this clock: Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune, Ahmedabad.

Watch out: IST is also Israel Standard Time (UTC+2) and Irish Standard Time (UTC+1). This page is the Indian one.

How the difference is worked out

The gap between Central European Time and India Standard Time is not one number. The two zones change their clocks on different dates, so for part of the year the difference is 3 hours 30 minutes and for the rest it is something else — the table above lists each stretch of 2026 with the date it starts and which country's clocks moved.

With both zones on their own standard time — daylight saving not in force anywhere — India Standard Time is 4 hours 30 minutes ahead of Central European Time. That figure never changes; everything else on this page follows from it plus whichever clocks have moved.

Every figure here comes from the IANA time zone database via your browser's own Intl engine, using the zone ids Europe/Paris and Asia/Kolkata. Nothing is looked up on a server and nothing about your visit is recorded.