Europe/Paris

TZ identifier and aliases

Europe/Paris is the canonical identifier for French metropolitan time. Europe/Monaco currently shares identical rules and is folded into the same entry — a reflection of Monaco's close economic integration with France rather than any formal treaty requirement. Europe/Paris has no older deprecated alias of its own in the tz database.

UTC offset and DST rule

Europe/Paris 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/Paris for a process that should schedule by French local time. Postgres accepts it via SET TIME ZONE 'Europe/Paris'; or the timezone setting, applying the DST rule correctly for any date rather than a fixed offset that would drift wrong twice a year. Where a scheduler supports a CRON_TZ=Europe/Paris line, jobs run by local time directly; GitHub Actions' schedule: trigger always evaluates in UTC and has no per-job timezone setting, so a job meant to fire at a fixed Paris 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

France adopted Paris Mean Time in 1891, defined by the Paris Observatory's own meridian rather than Greenwich's — a nine-minute-and-21-second offset from GMT that France kept using, somewhat awkwardly, on legal documents until formally switching to GMT-based Central European Time in 1911. During the German occupation in WWII, France was forced onto Central European Time permanently, and postwar France never reverted to the Greenwich-aligned time it used before the war — which is the actual historical reason Paris today shares an offset with Berlin and Rome rather than with London, despite Paris being at a similar longitude to the UK. The EU's DST harmonization directive, in force since the 1990s, means Europe/Paris's clock-change dates are identical to every other +01:00/+02:00 EU zone — Madrid, Rome, Berlin, Amsterdam and Warsaw among them — a rare case where dozens of otherwise-independent countries all shifted a computed field value on exactly the same UTC instant.

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.