Asia/Karachi

TZ identifier and aliases

Asia/Karachi is the canonical identifier for Pakistan Standard Time, covering the entire country. 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 — so Asia/Karachi has been the sole identifier for Pakistani civil time throughout the tz database's history.

UTC offset and DST rule

Asia/Karachi is +05:00 year-round with no daylight saving time. Pakistan has tried DST three separate times — in 2002, and again across 2008–2009 — and abandoned it each time; there's no seasonal clock change to account for in any system built against this zone today.

Using it in cron, CI and Postgres

Set TZ=Asia/Karachi for a process that should schedule by Pakistani local time. Postgres accepts it via SET TIME ZONE 'Asia/Karachi'; or the timezone setting. Because the offset is currently fixed, a cron job's local-time schedule behaves identically every day of the year, with no DST boundary to plan around — worth noting for any system with logic left over from one of Pakistan's past DST windows, since that code should now be either removed or made conditional rather than silently inactive.

History and quirks

Pakistan's three attempts at daylight saving all ran into the same wall: public resistance. The first, in 2002, was discontinued the same year it started; a second attempt spanning 2008 and 2009 fared no better, again abandoned "because of the same public controversy and resistance," per the government's own framing at the time. Much of the pushback centered on disrupted prayer and meal schedules during Ramadan when a DST trial happened to overlap with it, and on limited evidence that the change actually reduced electricity demand, a common thread across most abandoned DST experiments worldwide. Since 2009, Pakistan has kept a single fixed +05:00 offset with no further attempts to reintroduce seasonal clock changes, making Asia/Karachi one of the more settled zones in this family despite its rockier history than most of its South Asian neighbors, several of which never tried DST at all.

Pakistan's +05:00 offset — a whole-hour value, unlike India's neighboring +05:30 — is itself a small point of regional friction: the two countries share a long land border and a pre-partition history under a single colonial administration, yet crossing between them today means crossing a half-hour offset boundary rather than a whole-hour one, an unusual arrangement largely explained by each country choosing its own post-independence reference meridian rather than continuing to share British India's single prewar time standard. Karachi's role as Pakistan's largest city and main port, despite Islamabad being the political capital, is why the tz database's naming convention landed on Asia/Karachi rather than a capital-based identifier — consistent with the same pattern seen in Asia/Ho_Chi_Minh and several other zones in this family.

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.