Pacific/Auckland

TZ identifier and aliases

Pacific/Auckland is the canonical identifier for New Zealand time, covering both main islands. The bare country name NZ is an older name still pointing at the same rules but is a deprecated alias — use Pacific/Auckland in new code. Antarctica/McMurdo, the US Antarctic research station, currently shares identical rules and is folded into the same entry, since McMurdo's supply chain and staff rotations run out of New Zealand.

UTC offset and DST rule

Pacific/Auckland is +13:00 (NZDT) during daylight saving and +12:00 (NZST) on standard time — like Australia, the offset is higher in summer here because New Zealand's summer falls in the December–February window. DST runs from the last Sunday in September to the first Sunday in April — September 27 and April 5 in 2026.

Using it in cron, CI and Postgres

Set TZ=Pacific/Auckland for a process that should schedule by New Zealand local time — as with Australia's zones, code assuming a northern-hemisphere "DST is summer" calendar will get this backward, since New Zealand's DST window covers its own local summer instead. Postgres accepts it via SET TIME ZONE 'Pacific/Auckland'; or the timezone setting and applies the correct rule automatically. Where a scheduler supports a CRON_TZ=Pacific/Auckland line, jobs run by local time directly; GitHub Actions' schedule: trigger always evaluates in UTC, so a fixed-local-hour job needs its UTC equivalent recalculated across each transition.

History and quirks

New Zealand was one of the earliest countries in the world to adopt a standard national time, in 1868 — decades before most of Europe or North America standardized their own zones — originally set 11.5 hours ahead of GMT and only later rounded to the current whole-hour offset. At +12:00 standard and +13:00 during DST, New Zealand sits among the furthest-ahead civil time zones on Earth, meaning it's usually among the first populated places to reach any given UTC calendar date — a detail that matters disproportionately for any system logging "first user of the day" or similar date-boundary events globally. The Chatham Islands, a small New Zealand territory further east, keep their own separate 45-minute-offset zone beyond Pacific/Auckland, one of the very few quarter-hour-increment time zones anywhere in the world.

New Zealand's early 1868 standardization predates even the 1884 international conference that established the modern meridian-based zone system most of the world eventually adopted, making it a genuine pioneer rather than a follower in global timekeeping — a detail often overshadowed by the country's small population and remote location. Being among the first places on Earth to reach each new UTC date also gives Pacific/Auckland an outsized role in global New Year's Eve broadcast schedules, financial market open/close sequencing, and any system that needs a reliable "start of day" anchor for worldwide event logging — a practical consequence of geography that has nothing to do with the DST rule 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.