Asia/Bangkok

TZ identifier and aliases

Asia/Bangkok is the canonical identifier for Thailand's civil time. Asia/Phnom_Penh (Cambodia) and Asia/Vientiane (Laos) currently share identical rules and are folded into the same entry — three separate countries whose civil time happens to align rather than one being an alias of another. Asia/Bangkok has no deprecated backward-compatibility alias of its own.

UTC offset and DST rule

Asia/Bangkok is +07:00 year-round with no daylight saving time. Thailand has never observed DST, 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=Asia/Bangkok for a process that should schedule by Thai local time. Postgres accepts it via SET TIME ZONE 'Asia/Bangkok'; 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 local hour to plan around.

History and quirks

Thailand adopted +07:00 as its standard time in 1920, and — alone among the larger Southeast Asian economies — has never introduced daylight saving in the century since, a consistency shared with its immediate neighbors Cambodia, Laos and (partially) Vietnam, all of which sit in the same +07:00 band. That regional alignment is largely a product of geography rather than coordination: mainland Southeast Asia's low latitude means day length barely shifts across the seasons, removing much of the practical rationale for a clock change that higher-latitude countries cite. Bangkok's offset puts it one hour behind Singapore and Kuala Lumpur despite sitting at a similar longitude to both — a gap that traces back to Malaysia and Singapore's 1982 decision to adopt +08:00 for trade convenience rather than any difference in Thailand's own geographic position, and one that regularly trips up scheduling across the wider Southeast Asian region.

Thailand's +07:00 offset also underpins the "Indochina Time" label historians use for the shared colonial-era standard French Indochina (modern Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) once used. Vietnam's own zone, Asia/Ho_Chi_Minh, still sits at the identical +07:00 numeric offset today, even though the tz database keeps it as a separate identifier from Asia/Bangkok rather than folding it into the same entry — a reminder that "same current offset" and "same tz database group" aren't always the same thing; the grouping only merges zones whose full historical rule set matches, not just their present-day value. For any system serving mainland Southeast Asia broadly, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam all resolve to +07:00 today, while Myanmar (+06:30), Indonesia's western zone (+07:00 but a separate entry) and Malaysia (+08:00) each need their own explicit handling rather than being assumed to match.

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.