Africa/Cairo

TZ identifier and aliases

Africa/Cairo is the canonical identifier for Egyptian civil time, covering the entire country. The bare country name Egypt is an older name still pointing at the same rules but is a deprecated alias — use Africa/Cairo in new code.

UTC offset and DST rule

Africa/Cairo is +02:00 (EET) on standard time and +03:00 (EEST) during daylight saving. Egypt's current rule, restored by law in 2023 after an eight-year gap, runs DST from the last Friday in April to the last Thursday in October — April 24 and October 29 in 2026 — one of the few zones in this family whose transitions land on weekdays other than Sunday.

Using it in cron, CI and Postgres

Set TZ=Africa/Cairo for a process that should schedule by Egyptian local time — worth flagging specifically for any system with DST logic written before 2023, since Egypt abolished daylight saving in 2015 and only reinstated it eight years later, meaning code assuming Egypt has no DST (accurate from 2015–2023) is now wrong again. Postgres accepts it via SET TIME ZONE 'Africa/Cairo'; or the timezone setting and applies the current rule correctly. Where a scheduler supports a CRON_TZ=Africa/Cairo line, jobs run by local time directly; GitHub Actions' schedule: trigger always evaluates in UTC, so a fixed-local-hour job needs its UTC equivalent recalculated across each transition — and double-checked after any tzdata update, given how recently this rule changed.

History and quirks

Egypt has reversed its daylight saving policy more than once this decade. The government abolished DST in April 2015, citing negligible measured electricity savings from a poll conducted that year. It stayed off for eight years before the Egyptian Cabinet passed legislation in March 2023 to restore it, which President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi ratified that April — officially aligning Egypt with Eastern European Summer Time each year from late April to late October. That back-and-forth makes Africa/Cairo one of the more volatile zones in this family to build long-lived software against: any system that cached or hardcoded "Egypt has no DST" between 2015 and 2023 needs updating now that the rule has changed again, and there's no guarantee it won't change a third time.

Egypt's Friday/Thursday transition days, rather than the Sunday most of this family uses, trace to the country's weekend falling on Friday and Saturday rather than Saturday and Sunday — scheduling the clock change for a weekday morning when offices and schools are already open would be far more disruptive than doing it at the edge of the working week, the same logic Israel applies with its own Friday-anchored DST start. Cairo's population — the largest metropolitan area in Africa — means the practical stakes of getting this rule wrong in a scheduling system are unusually high: transit timetables, telecom billing cycles and financial settlement windows across the country all depend on Africa/Cairo resolving to the correct offset for a given date.

Offsets and DST transitions on this page are computed from the IANA time zone database bundled with your browser; the rules described above were verified against tzdata 2026b when this page was published.