Follow-the-sun, five offices team clock

When is everyone in?

The tables below assume a nine-to-six day in each city and count, for every hour of Kolkata's day, how many of the 5 offices are inside theirs. That is an assumption, printed so you can see it — not a recommendation, because nothing here knows anyone's real hours. There is one table per arrangement of the clocks, because 3 different arrangements occur during 2026.

The arrangements, with dates

Kolkata on IST, Singapore on SGT, London on BST, New York on EDT, Los Angeles on PDT

29 Mar – 25 Oct 2026. Never all 5 at work in a nine-to-six day; at most 3 of 5, at 2:00pm – 4:00pm, 10:00pm – 11:00pm Kolkata time. At least one office is open at every hour.

Kolkata on IST, Singapore on SGT, London on GMT, New York on EST, Los Angeles on PST

1 Jan – 8 Mar 2026; 1 Nov – 31 Dec 2026. Never all 5 at work in a nine-to-six day; at most 3 of 5, at 3:00pm – 4:00pm, 11:00pm – 12:00am Kolkata time. At least one office is open at every hour.

Kolkata on IST, Singapore on SGT, London on GMT, New York on EDT, Los Angeles on PDT

8 Mar – 29 Mar 2026; 25 Oct – 1 Nov 2026. Never all 5 at work in a nine-to-six day; at most 3 of 5, at 3:00pm – 4:00pm, 10:00pm – 12:00am Kolkata time. At least one office is open at every hour.

Shaded cells are inside that city's nine-to-six; a highlighted row has every office in. For a different working day or another city, use the timeline above — the daylight colour on each band is the same question answered by the sun.

Working across Kolkata, Singapore, London, New York, Los Angeles

Follow-the-sun is the promise that a ticket raised at any hour lands on a desk that is awake, and this footprint is the usual way of keeping it: Singapore opens first, India two and a half hours later, London as India's afternoon begins, New York as London's afternoon begins, and Los Angeles as New York's afternoon begins — by which time Singapore is only a few hours from opening again. The tables below check the claim rather than assert it: for every hour of the day, in every part of the year, they count how many of the five offices are inside a nine-to-six day. The number that matters is the smallest one on the page, and it is never zero.

Coverage is not the same as overlap. There is no hour at which all five, or even four, of these cities are at work together, and the hours at which three are come in the two handoff regions — the Asian morning, when Singapore and India overlap and London is starting, and the Atlantic afternoon, when London, New York and, briefly, Los Angeles coincide. A follow-the-sun organisation is therefore a chain of pairwise handoffs, and the pair that matters most is the weakest link: Los Angeles to Singapore, whose working days do not touch at all, so the last American shift hands off into a written queue, not a call.

Three of the five cities change their clocks and two do not, so the ring is a different shape at different times of year. The United States moves on the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November; the United Kingdom on the last Sunday in March and the last Sunday in October; Singapore and India never move. That produces five distinct arrangements a year — five tables below — and in the short gap weeks each spring and autumn, when the US has moved and the UK has not, the London–New York handoff is an hour tighter than usual while the Asian half of the ring is unaffected.

The date line sits inside this ring twice over. When Los Angeles ends its Friday, it is Saturday afternoon in Singapore and India; when Singapore starts its Monday, it is Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles. Anything described as "end of day" or "start of week" on this footprint needs a city next to it, and the tables mark the day change on every row where a city's date differs from the home city's. The vertical rule on each band above is that city's midnight.

Each city stands for a region. Singapore's clock is Kuala Lumpur's, Manila's and Hong Kong's; India's is one zone for the whole country; London's is Dublin's and Lisbon's, with Paris, Berlin and Warsaw an hour ahead on the same change dates; New York's is Toronto's and the whole US East Coast's; Los Angeles's is Seattle's and San Francisco's. A ring built through Sydney or Tokyo instead of Singapore is a different shape — Sydney's daylight saving runs in the opposite season — and the tool above will draw it if you add the city.

Sources

The offsets, dates and hour tables above are computed when this page is built, from the time zone rules your browser itself ships. The rules come from:

• IANA Time Zone Database — the rules every browser ships
• GOV.UK — When do the clocks change?
• NIST — Daylight Saving Time rules (United States)
• ECMA-402 — the Intl.DateTimeFormat standard these figures are computed with