Europe/Moscow

TZ identifier and aliases

Europe/Moscow is the canonical identifier for Moscow Time, covering Moscow, Saint Petersburg and most of western Russia. W-SU is an older name still pointing at the same rules but is a deprecated alias — use Europe/Moscow in new code. Europe/Kirov and Europe/Volgograd currently share identical rules and are folded into the same entry.

UTC offset and DST rule

Europe/Moscow is +03:00 year-round with no daylight saving time. Russia's relationship with DST has been unusually volatile: the country ran on permanent daylight time (+04:00) from 2011 to 2014, then reversed course entirely, settling on permanent standard time (+03:00) since October 2014 — so there's been no seasonal clock change to account for in over a decade.

Using it in cron, CI and Postgres

Set TZ=Europe/Moscow for a process that should schedule by Moscow local time — naming the zone rather than hardcoding +03:00 keeps a config self-documenting and automatically correct should Russia reverse its DST policy again, which its recent history suggests isn't out of the question. Postgres accepts it via SET TIME ZONE 'Europe/Moscow'; 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 work around — one of the simpler zones in this family for recurring scheduled jobs, despite its complicated recent history.

History and quirks

Few zones in this family have changed rules as dramatically, or as recently, as Moscow. In March 2011 Russia's government set clocks forward for what it announced would be the final time, adopting permanent daylight time nationwide and abolishing the twice-yearly change altogether — a decision President Dmitry Medvedev framed as ending the disruption and productivity loss DST caused. That arrangement (effectively +04:00 year-round) lasted about three years before public complaints about dark winter mornings pushed the State Duma to reverse it in mid-2014, moving Russia to permanent standard time (+03:00) instead that October — the opposite fixed point from the one chosen in 2011, and a rare example of a country trying both "permanent summer time" and "permanent winter time" as policy experiments within the same decade. Because Moscow Time also serves as the reference zone for much of Russia's rail and federal broadcast scheduling, a change this size required recalibrating systems across ten time zones' worth of territory, not just the Moscow region itself.

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.