America/Bogota

TZ identifier and aliases

America/Bogota is the canonical identifier for Colombia Time, covering the entire country. Unlike most zones in this family, it has no aliases at all in the tz database's grouping — no deprecated backward-compatibility name and no other zone currently sharing identical rules — making America/Bogota the only identifier that has ever mapped to Colombian civil time.

UTC offset and DST rule

America/Bogota is -05:00 year-round with no daylight saving time. Colombia briefly experimented with DST once, in 1992–1993, and has kept a fixed offset ever since — 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=America/Bogota for a process that should schedule by Colombian local time — naming the zone rather than hardcoding -05:00 keeps a config self-documenting and automatically correct should the rule ever change again. Postgres accepts it via SET TIME ZONE 'America/Bogota'; or the timezone setting. Because the offset never changes, a cron job's local-time schedule behaves identically on every calendar day — no 2am window to avoid, no duplicated or skipped runs around a DST boundary, which makes America/Bogota one of the operationally simplest zones in this family to build recurring jobs against.

History and quirks

Colombia's one brush with daylight saving came during a 1992 energy crisis: reduced water levels in hydroelectric reservoirs, worsened by an El Niño weather pattern, prompted President César Gaviria's government to move clocks forward an hour starting in May 1992, hoping to trim electricity demand during peak evening hours. The measure lasted about nine months before being quietly dropped in early 1993, and Colombia has run on fixed standard time ever since — a pattern common across equatorial countries, where day length barely varies across the seasons and the energy-saving rationale for DST is weakest. At -05:00, Bogotá shares its exact offset with the US Eastern zone's winter standard time and with Lima, Peru, making "what time is it in Bogotá" unusually easy to answer from New York for about eight months of the year and off by exactly one hour for the DST-observing remainder.

Colombia's hydroelectric dependence — still a significant share of the national grid today — is the direct thread connecting that one DST experiment to the country's broader energy policy history; the 1992 measure was paired with rolling blackouts and public conservation campaigns rather than being a standalone clock-change initiative, which is part of why it was dropped so quickly once reservoir levels recovered rather than being kept as a permanent yearly policy the way US and European DST became. No other Colombian government has revisited the idea since, making America/Bogota one of the most stable zones in this family, alongside its Andean neighbors Peru and Ecuador, which have never observed DST at all.

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.