Asia/Dubai

TZ identifier and aliases

Asia/Dubai is the canonical identifier for United Arab Emirates time. Asia/Muscat, covering Oman, currently shares identical rules and is folded into the same entry — two separate countries whose civil time happens to line up rather than one being an alias of the other. Asia/Dubai has no deprecated backward-compatibility alias of its own.

UTC offset and DST rule

Asia/Dubai is +04:00 year-round with no daylight saving time. The UAE has never observed DST since its founding, 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/Dubai for a process that should schedule by UAE local time. Postgres accepts it via SET TIME ZONE 'Asia/Dubai'; or the timezone setting. Because the offset never changes, a cron job's local-time schedule behaves identically every day of the year — no DST boundary, no skipped or duplicated hour — which makes Asia/Dubai a straightforward zone to build recurring jobs against, a relevant detail given how many international logistics and finance systems run on Gulf-region schedules.

History and quirks

The UAE, formed in 1971 from seven emirates including Dubai and Abu Dhabi, adopted a single national standard time at +04:00 from the outset and has never deviated from it — no DST experiment, no regional splits, no historical offset changes recorded in the tz database. That stability is common across the Gulf states generally: Oman, Saudi Arabia and Qatar all keep similarly fixed, DST-free offsets, largely because their low latitude means day length barely varies across the seasons, removing the practical rationale for daylight saving that higher-latitude countries cite. Dubai's offset, +04:00, sits exactly between Moscow's and Pakistan's, giving it a useful role as a scheduling middle ground for meetings spanning Europe and South/East Asia — a big part of why Dubai has become a regional hub for logistics and finance coordination across time zones that would otherwise have little business-hours overlap.

The UAE's working week itself is a separate scheduling detail worth knowing alongside the offset: like most of the Gulf, the country runs a Sunday-to-Thursday business week rather than the Monday-to-Friday pattern most scheduling tools default to, which matters more for coordinating meetings and batch jobs than the fixed offset does day to day. Because Asia/Dubai has never changed since the UAE's 1971 founding, it's also one of the more reliable reference zones for any historical timestamp data involving the Emirates — there's no DST-era ambiguity to resolve the way there would be for a zone like Africa/Cairo or Europe/Moscow that has changed rules more than once in recent memory.

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.