GST to GMT time converter

How far apart are Dubai and London?

It depends on the date. London is 3 hours behind Dubai while Dubai is on GST and London on BST. London is 4 hours behind Dubai while Dubai is on GST and London on GMT. The exact dates for 2026 and 2027 are below, worked out from the same time zone database your browser uses — not remembered.

2026

2027

GST to GMT hour table

Every hour of a Dubai day, read across to London — one column per gap, so pick the column for today's date from the table above. A row marked +1 day is already tomorrow there; −1 day is still yesterday.

Each column is one value of the gap; the clock names under it are the ones in force when that gap applies. For a half-hour time or a third city, use the timeline above: every clock moves to the instant you pick.

Working across Dubai and London

Dubai is four hours ahead of London in the British winter and three hours ahead in British Summer Time, and the change is entirely on the British side. The United Arab Emirates keeps UTC+4 all year and has never observed daylight saving; the UK moves to UTC+1 at 1am on the last Sunday in March and back at 2am on the last Sunday in October. So a 2pm call in Dubai is 10am in London from November to March and 11am from April to October, and a standing meeting fixed in one city's time moves by an hour in the other twice a year.

The names are the trap on this pair. GMT is the offset London keeps only in winter; for seven months of the year a London clock shows BST, which is what most people mean when they say "UK time" in June. "GST" is Gulf Standard Time, but the same three letters mean a sales tax to much of the world, and even within the Gulf people say "Dubai time" or "UAE time" rather than the abbreviation. The honest names for this conversion are Asia/Dubai and Europe/London, which are what the tool above uses, and the search box accepts "dubai", "uae", "uk" and "london" for exactly this reason.

The working-hour overlap is good, and better in summer. A London nine-to-six day runs from 1pm to 10pm in Dubai under GMT and from noon to 9pm under BST, so the shared window is Dubai's afternoon against London's morning and midday — five hours in winter, six in summer. Dubai teams serving UK customers often shift their day later to cover London's afternoon; London teams serving the Gulf start early. The larger difference between the two is the week: the UAE moved to a Monday-to-Friday week in January 2022, with Friday a half day, so the two calendars now line up apart from Friday afternoon. Neighbouring Saudi Arabia still works Sunday to Thursday.

Because the gap is under five hours the calendar date rarely differs — only from 8pm or 9pm in London is it already tomorrow in Dubai — so the day-change rows in the hour table are few. The exception is the one that matters for release schedules: a London "midnight" deployment is 4am (or 3am) in Dubai on the same night, and a Dubai "start of business" is the small hours in London.

London is the reference for the whole of western Europe's clock changes: Paris, Berlin, Madrid and Rome change on the same Sundays, one hour ahead of London, so Dubai is three hours ahead of central Europe in winter and two in summer. Add a European city in the tool above and its band moves on the same day as London's. If the time you are holding is a Unix timestamp, decode it in the epoch converter first — it has no time zone until you give it one.

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?
• ECMA-402 — the Intl.DateTimeFormat standard these figures are computed with