GST to UTC

About Gulf Standard Time

The Gulf runs at a fixed UTC+4, with no clock changes. The half-hour offsets of South Asia start immediately to its east, so the step from Dubai to Karachi is one hour but the step from Dubai to Mumbai is an hour and a half.

Cities on this clock: Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Baku, Tbilisi.

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

Neither Gulf Standard Time nor Coordinated Universal Time moves its clock relative to the other, so coordinated universal time is 4 hours behind gulf standard time is a rule rather than a fact about one particular year. The hour-by-hour table above holds on every date.

With both zones on their own standard time — daylight saving not in force anywhere — Coordinated Universal Time is 4 hours behind Gulf Standard 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 Asia/Dubai and UTC. Nothing is looked up on a server and nothing about your visit is recorded.