Asia/Jerusalem

TZ identifier and aliases

Asia/Jerusalem is the canonical identifier for Israel Standard Time. Israel (bare country name) and Asia/Tel_Aviv are older names still pointing at the same rules but are deprecated aliases — use Asia/Jerusalem in new code.

UTC offset and DST rule

Asia/Jerusalem is +02:00 (IST) on standard time and +03:00 (IDT) during daylight saving. Unlike every other DST-observing zone in this family, Israel's clock change lands on a Friday, not a Sunday: since a 2013 legal reform, DST begins on the Friday before the last Sunday in March and ends on the last Sunday in October — March 27 and October 25 in 2026.

Using it in cron, CI and Postgres

Set TZ=Asia/Jerusalem for a process that should schedule by Israeli local time — code that assumes every DST-observing zone changes on a Sunday (a very common shortcut, since it's true for the US, EU and most of this family) will get Israel's transition date wrong, so any scheduling logic that hardcodes "last/nth Sunday" rather than reading the actual tz rule needs a specific exception here. Postgres accepts it via SET TIME ZONE 'Asia/Jerusalem'; or the timezone setting and applies the correct Friday-anchored rule automatically. Where a scheduler supports a CRON_TZ=Asia/Jerusalem line, jobs run by local time directly; GitHub Actions' schedule: trigger always evaluates in UTC, so a fixed-local-hour job needs its UTC equivalent recalculated across each transition.

History and quirks

Israel's DST start date is deliberately set on a Friday rather than the more common Sunday specifically to work around the Jewish Sabbath, which runs from Friday evening to Saturday evening — changing clocks mid-Sabbath or immediately before it would create religious and logistical complications the Knesset chose to avoid by design. Before the current rule took effect in 2013, Israel's DST end date moved around from year to year, sometimes tied to the Hebrew calendar (falling before or after Yom Kippur depending on the year), which made the exact autumn transition genuinely unpredictable more than a year or two in advance — a rare case where a country's DST rule wasn't a fixed calendar formula at all. The 2013 reform fixed both dates to the Gregorian calendar going forward, trading that older flexibility for the predictability every other DST-observing zone in this family already had.

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.