Asia/Manila

TZ identifier and aliases

Asia/Manila is the canonical identifier for Philippine Standard Time, covering the entire country. It's one of the few zones in this family with 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/Manila has been the sole identifier for Philippine civil time throughout the tz database's history.

UTC offset and DST rule

Asia/Manila is +08:00 year-round with no daylight saving time. The Philippines experimented with DST a handful of times historically but has kept a single fixed offset for decades, 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/Manila for a process that should schedule by Philippine local time. Postgres accepts it via SET TIME ZONE 'Asia/Manila'; 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 — a relevant simplicity given how much outsourced customer support and back-office scheduling runs on Manila time for companies elsewhere in the world.

History and quirks

The Philippines has a genuinely unusual entry in world time zone history: in 1844, under Spanish colonial administration, the islands skipped December 31 entirely, jumping straight from December 30 to January 1, in order to align the colony's calendar with Asia rather than with Spain's own trans-Pacific possessions in the Americas, which the Philippines had previously been administratively grouped with despite being on the wrong side of the international date line for that alignment to make sense geographically. That single missing calendar day is one of the most concrete examples anywhere of a country's date line position being a matter of administrative convenience rather than pure geography. Since American colonial administration standardized +08:00 in the early 20th century, the Philippines has kept that offset with only brief, uncontested DST experiments during wartime, none of which persisted.

Before that 1844 realignment, the Philippines had effectively run a day behind the rest of Asia for roughly three centuries, a legacy of Manila galleons crossing the Pacific from Mexico rather than arriving via the Indian Ocean trade routes most of the region used — meaning the switch wasn't a minor bureaucratic correction but the resolution of a centuries-long date discrepancy with immediate neighbors like China and Japan. The customs office and colonial government coordinated the change deliberately during a lull between ships to minimize disruption to in-transit correspondence and trade records, a level of logistical care that modern date-line and time zone transitions (Samoa's own 2011 date line jump among them) still have to plan around today.

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.