Asia/Jakarta

TZ identifier and aliases

Asia/Jakarta is the canonical identifier for Western Indonesia Time (WIB), covering Jakarta, Sumatra, Java and West/Central Kalimantan. Asia/Pontianak currently shares identical rules and is folded into the same entry. Asia/Jakarta is only one of three time zones Indonesia maintains — Central and Eastern Indonesia Time cover the rest of the archipelago separately and are not part of this entry.

UTC offset and DST rule

Asia/Jakarta is +07:00 year-round with no daylight saving time. Indonesia has never observed DST in any of its zones, so there's no seasonal clock change to account for in any system built against Asia/Jakarta.

Using it in cron, CI and Postgres

Set TZ=Asia/Jakarta for a process that should schedule by Western Indonesia local time — critically, it does not cover the whole country, so a system serving Indonesian users nationally likely also needs Asia/Makassar (Central, +08:00) and Asia/Jayapura (Eastern, +09:00) rather than assuming one zone fits all. Postgres accepts Asia/Jakarta via SET TIME ZONE 'Asia/Jakarta'; 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 to account for.

History and quirks

Indonesia's three-zone system dates to a 1988 consolidation of what had been a more fragmented set of colonial-era Dutch East Indies time zones — the current WIB/WITA/WIT split still roughly follows those old boundaries, spanning the world's largest archipelago from Sumatra in the west to Papua in the east, a distance covering three full hours of offset. Jakarta itself, despite being Indonesia's capital and by far its largest city, sits at the western edge of the country's populated landmass, which is part of why Western Indonesia Time is also home to the clear majority of the country's population, since it covers the densely populated islands of Java and Sumatra alongside the capital — a useful fact for any system tempted to default every Indonesian user to Asia/Jakarta without asking, since it will be right most of the time but silently wrong for the sizeable minority in Kalimantan's eastern reaches, Sulawesi, Bali or Papua. A long-running government proposal to consolidate all of Indonesia onto a single time zone, similar to China's policy, has been debated periodically but never adopted, given the country's east-west span would make a single offset impractical for daily life in the far eastern provinces.

Jakarta's status as capital is itself now in transition: Indonesia has begun relocating its national capital to a new planned city, Nusantara, in East Kalimantan — which falls under Central Indonesia Time (Asia/Makassar), not Asia/Jakarta — a move that will eventually decouple "Indonesia's capital" from "Indonesia's default time zone" for the first time in the republic's history, though Jakarta is expected to remain the country's largest city and economic center regardless.

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.