Europe/Amsterdam

TZ identifier and aliases

Europe/Amsterdam is the canonical identifier for Dutch civil time. It has no deprecated backward-compatibility name of its own. In recent tz database releases it is stored as a link to Europe/Brussels, because the two zones have identical rules from 1970 onward, but the Amsterdam identifier is still valid and still the right value to use for Netherlands time in code, cron jobs and TZ variables.

UTC offset and DST rule

Europe/Amsterdam is +01:00 (CET) on standard time and +02:00 (CEST) during daylight saving, following the EU-harmonized rule: the last Sunday in March through the last Sunday in October, both at 1am UTC — March 29 and October 25 in 2026.

Using it in cron, CI and Postgres

Set TZ=Europe/Amsterdam for a process that should schedule by Dutch local time. Postgres accepts it via SET TIME ZONE 'Europe/Amsterdam'; or the timezone setting, applying the DST rule correctly for any date. Where a scheduler supports a CRON_TZ=Europe/Amsterdam line, jobs run by local time directly; GitHub Actions' schedule: trigger always evaluates in UTC with no per-job timezone, so a job meant to fire at a fixed Amsterdam hour needs its UTC equivalent recalculated across each DST boundary. Avoid the 2:00–3:00am local window for anything that must run exactly once — it's skipped on the March transition and repeated on the October one.

History and quirks

The Netherlands has one of the more idiosyncratic pre-standardization histories on this list: it kept its own Amsterdam Time, defined by the city's own meridian and running roughly 20 minutes ahead of Greenwich, as the country's official legal time well into the 20th century — decades after most of Europe had adopted zone-based standard time. That changed in May 1940, when German occupation forced the Netherlands onto Central European Time, a wartime change the country chose not to reverse afterward, similar to France's own postwar decision to keep the occupier's clock. That 20-minute historical discrepancy is part of why some older Dutch railway timetables and maps reference a time offset that looks slightly "off" by modern standards, and it's the reason the country's civil time doesn't line up as cleanly with its geographic meridian as a strict solar-time calculation would suggest. Since adopting CET, the Netherlands has followed the EU's harmonized DST rule consistently, keeping Europe/Amsterdam synchronized with Berlin, Paris, Rome and Madrid on every clock-change date.

The Netherlands' position as a major logistics and technology hub — home to one of Europe's busiest ports and a dense cluster of data centers around Amsterdam itself — means Europe/Amsterdam sees particularly heavy use in infrastructure scheduling and financial-sector systems, where its EU-standard DST behavior makes it interchangeable with Berlin or Paris in most cross-border scheduling logic despite the country's otherwise unusual pre-war time zone history.

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.