SAST to UTC

About South Africa Standard Time

South Africa is a fixed UTC+2 and has never used daylight saving. Being in the southern hemisphere, its working day overlaps Europe most comfortably and North America least — and unlike its northern counterparts nothing about that changes through the year.

Cities on this clock: Johannesburg, Cape Town, Khartoum.

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 South Africa Standard Time nor Coordinated Universal Time moves its clock relative to the other, so coordinated universal time is 2 hours behind south africa 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 2 hours behind South Africa 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 Africa/Johannesburg and UTC. Nothing is looked up on a server and nothing about your visit is recorded.