Africa/Nairobi

TZ identifier and aliases

Africa/Nairobi is the canonical identifier for East Africa Time, covering Kenya. Several other East African capitals — Africa/Addis_Ababa (Ethiopia), Africa/Kampala (Uganda), Africa/Dar_es_Salaam (Tanzania), Africa/Mogadishu (Somalia), Africa/Asmara (Eritrea) and Africa/Djibouti — currently share identical rules and are folded into the same entry, a regional cluster of independently-arrived-at +03:00 offsets rather than any alias relationship. Africa/Asmera, an older spelling of Asmara, is a deprecated alias within the same group.

UTC offset and DST rule

Africa/Nairobi is +03:00 year-round with no daylight saving time. Kenya 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/Nairobi for a process that should schedule by Kenyan local time. Postgres accepts it via SET TIME ZONE 'Africa/Nairobi'; 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 Nairobi's role as a major East African tech and finance hub, with a large base of fintech and mobile-money systems (M-Pesa among the best known) running scheduled jobs against this zone.

History and quirks

East Africa Time reflects one of the more historically stable regional clusters anywhere in this family: Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania and several neighbors all sit within +03:00 and none has adopted daylight saving, a consistency rooted in the region's near-equatorial location where day length changes by only minutes across the entire year, leaving essentially no rationale for a seasonal clock shift. Ethiopia is the notable cultural outlier within this otherwise uniform zone: it uses a distinct 12-hour "Ethiopian time" convention in everyday speech, where the day is counted from local sunrise (roughly 6am on the Gregorian clock) rather than midnight — a real and widely-used local practice that nonetheless has no bearing on Africa/Nairobi or Africa/Addis_Ababa's underlying UTC offset, which stays the conventional +03:00 in every computer system and international schedule regardless of how the hour is spoken about locally.

That distinction matters for any product localizing time display for Ethiopian users specifically: showing "6:00" when a Gregorian-clock app means midnight, rather than the locally-expected sunrise reference, is a recurring source of confusion in software that translates strings but doesn't account for the different time-counting convention underneath. No such adjustment is needed for Africa/Nairobi itself or for Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, which all use the standard 24-hour Gregorian convention in both speech and software — Ethiopia's dual system is specific to Ethiopia and the Ethiopian calendar, not a wider East African pattern.

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.