Asia/Singapore

TZ identifier and aliases

Asia/Singapore is the canonical identifier for Singapore Standard Time. The bare country name Singapore is an older name still pointing at the same rules but is a deprecated alias. Asia/Kuala_Lumpur currently shares identical rules and is folded into the same entry — Malaysia and Singapore have kept synchronized clocks since Singapore's 1965 independence, despite being separate countries with entirely independent governments.

UTC offset and DST rule

Asia/Singapore is +08:00 year-round with no daylight saving time. Singapore's low latitude means day length barely varies across the seasons, so there's no historical or current DST rule to account for in any system built against this zone.

Using it in cron, CI and Postgres

Set TZ=Asia/Singapore for a process that should schedule by Singapore local time. Postgres accepts it via SET TIME ZONE 'Asia/Singapore'; 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 is one reason Singapore has become a popular default time zone for regional cloud infrastructure and CI scheduling across Southeast Asia: it's simple to reason about and never needs revisiting for a rule change.

History and quirks

Singapore's +08:00 offset is a notable outlier relative to its own longitude: the city sits roughly on the same meridian as Bangkok and Jakarta, both an hour behind at +07:00, but Singapore adopted Malaysia's +08:00 offset in 1982 specifically to simplify business hours with its larger neighbor and main trading partner — a deliberate economic choice over a geographically "correct" one, similar in spirit to Spain's WWII-era shift or China's single-zone policy. The result is that solar noon in Singapore occurs closer to 12:45–1pm on the clock than true noon, a small but persistent daylight mismatch residents have simply adapted to. Because Malaysia and Singapore's civil time has stayed synchronized ever since, the tz database treats Asia/Kuala_Lumpur and Asia/Singapore as rule-identical entries even though they represent two fully independent sovereign nations' legal time.

Singapore's role as a global financial and logistics hub means Asia/Singapore sees an outsized volume of scheduled software relative to the country's small physical size — stock exchange settlement windows, port and shipping schedules, and a large share of Southeast Asian cloud infrastructure default to this zone specifically because it never changes and sits at a convenient midpoint for coordinating between European and East Asian business hours. That stability is also why global companies frequently pick Singapore as a regional headquarters time reference even when most of their actual Southeast Asian customer base sits in Asia/Jakarta or Asia/Bangkok instead, accepting the one-hour offset gap in exchange for a zone that has never needed a rule update.

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.