CET to UTC

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 Coordinated Universal Time

UTC never shifts. It is the reference every other zone is defined against, which is why logs, flight schedules and protocol timestamps use it. GMT is the same clock for every civil purpose, so a query for one is answered by the other.

Cities on this clock: Reykjavik, Accra, Abidjan, Dakar.

Watch out: GMT is also used loosely to mean "UK time", and those are not the same thing for seven months of the year — the United Kingdom moves to BST (UTC+1) while UTC stays put.

How the difference is worked out

The gap between Central European Time and Coordinated Universal Time is not one number. The two zones change their clocks on different dates, so for part of the year the difference is 2 hours 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 — Coordinated Universal Time is 1 hour behind 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 UTC. Nothing is looked up on a server and nothing about your visit is recorded.