HKT to GMT time converter

How far apart are Hong Kong and London?

It depends on the date. London is 7 hours behind Hong Kong while Hong Kong is on HKT and London on BST. London is 8 hours behind Hong Kong while Hong Kong is on HKT 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

HKT to GMT hour table

Every hour of a Hong Kong 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 Hong Kong and London

Hong Kong is eight hours ahead of London in the British winter and seven in British Summer Time. Hong Kong has not changed its clocks since 1979 and keeps UTC+8 all year; 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 the whole of the seasonal movement is London's. The same UTC+8 clock is shared by Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Taipei, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Manila and Perth, so everything on this page applies to a colleague in any of them.

For the finance and technology teams that run between the two cities, the overlap is the end of Hong Kong's day against the start of London's. A London nine-to-six is 5pm to 2am in Hong Kong under GMT and 4pm to 1am under BST, which leaves one shared hour in winter — 9am to 10am London, 5pm to 6pm Hong Kong — and two in summer. Hong Kong teams routinely stay to 7pm to catch London's mid-morning; London teams start at 8 to catch Hong Kong's close. The daylight bands on the timeline above make it plain who is being asked to work in the dark.

The names need care. GMT is what London keeps only from late October to late March; in June a London clock shows BST, and a "3pm GMT" invite sent in summer is usually a mistake for 3pm BST, an hour later in Hong Kong than the letters say. HKT is unambiguous, though people in Hong Kong more often just say "Hong Kong time", and mainland colleagues say Beijing time or CST — which is also the abbreviation for US Central time, a clash the tool above avoids by working in the IANA zones Asia/Hong_Kong and Europe/London.

The calendar date differs for a large part of the day: from 4pm or 5pm in London it is already tomorrow in Hong Kong, and Hong Kong's whole morning is London's night before. "End of day Friday" in London is Saturday morning in Hong Kong; a Monday 9am Hong Kong start is Sunday 1am or 2am in London. The hour table marks those rows, and the vertical rule on each band above shows the midnight where the date turns.

Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Zurich change on the same Sundays as London and sit one hour ahead of it, so Hong Kong is seven hours ahead of central Europe in winter and six in summer; add a European city in the tool to see its band move on the same day as London's. If what 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