Europe/Warsaw

TZ identifier and aliases

Europe/Warsaw is the canonical identifier for Polish civil time. The bare country name Poland is an older name still pointing at the same rules but is a deprecated alias — use Europe/Warsaw in new code.

UTC offset and DST rule

Europe/Warsaw 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/Warsaw for a process that should schedule by Polish local time. Postgres accepts it via SET TIME ZONE 'Europe/Warsaw'; or the timezone setting, applying the DST rule correctly for any date. Where a scheduler supports a CRON_TZ=Europe/Warsaw 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 Warsaw 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

Warsaw switched from its own local mean time to Central European Time on August 5, 1915, under German occupation during WWI, and the rest of the country formally followed on May 31, 1922 — a wartime-imposed change that, unlike some others in this family, Poland kept voluntarily well beyond the occupation that introduced it. Its daylight saving history since has been patchier: introduced in 1946, repealed in 1949, revived from 1957–1964, then dropped again until settling into continuous annual use from 1977 onward. Poland's geographic position is notably similar to Spain's mismatch in reverse: its longitude sits close enough to Eastern European Time (+02:00/+03:00, the zone used by neighbors Ukraine and the Baltic states) that solar noon in Warsaw occurs noticeably later on the clock than in cities at a similar longitude further west, a recurring topic in Polish public debate about whether the country would be better aligned with Eastern European Time. For now, Europe/Warsaw stays synchronized with the EU's Central European bloc — Berlin, Paris, Rome and Madrid — sharing every clock-change date exactly, even though Poland's neighbors to the immediate east and south (Ukraine, Belarus) run a full hour ahead year-round.

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.