Africa/Lagos

TZ identifier and aliases

Africa/Lagos is the canonical identifier for West Africa Time, covering Nigeria. Seven other West and Central African countries' capitals — Africa/Bangui, Africa/Brazzaville, Africa/Douala, Africa/Kinshasa, Africa/Libreville, Africa/Luanda, Africa/Malabo, Africa/Niamey and Africa/Porto-Novo — currently share identical rules and are folded into the same entry, reflecting a wide regional cluster of countries that all adopted the same +01:00 offset independently rather than any single alias relationship.

UTC offset and DST rule

Africa/Lagos is +01:00 year-round with no daylight saving time. Nigeria has never observed DST since standardizing its national time, so there's no seasonal clock change to account for in any system built against this zone.

Using it in cron, CI and Postgres

Set TZ=Africa/Lagos for a process that should schedule by Nigerian local time. Postgres accepts it via SET TIME ZONE 'Africa/Lagos'; or the timezone setting. Because the offset never changes, a cron job's local-time schedule behaves identically every day of the year, with no DST boundary or skipped/duplicated hour to plan around — a relevant simplicity given Lagos's size as one of the world's largest and fastest-growing cities, with a correspondingly large base of scheduled systems running against this zone.

History and quirks

Nigeria standardized on +01:00 national time in 1919 under British colonial administration, choosing a fixed offset rather than the seasonally-adjusted system Britain itself used at home — consistent with most of West and Central Africa's low-latitude climate, where day length barely varies across the seasons and daylight saving offers little practical benefit. That shared low-latitude geography is the real reason Africa/Lagos's tz database entry groups together so many otherwise unrelated countries' capitals — Kinshasa, Luanda, Brazzaville and others — none of which coordinated their time zone policy with Nigeria directly; they simply arrived at the same +01:00, no-DST answer independently for similar climatic reasons. Nigeria's sheer population, now Africa's largest, makes Africa/Lagos one of the most heavily-used zone identifiers on the continent by any measure of scheduled software running against it.

Before independence, Nigeria briefly used a slightly different local mean time reference tied to Lagos's own meridian rather than a clean +01:00 offset, a common pattern across colonial-era Africa before the wider adoption of Greenwich-relative standard zones in the early 20th century. Because none of the nine countries sharing this tz database entry actually coordinate policy with one another, a change by any single one — Nigeria included — wouldn't automatically apply to the rest; the shared entry is purely a reflection of current rules matching, not a political or administrative link, and the tz database would split them into separate entries the moment their rules diverged.

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.