time zones
Meetings between the US and India — the fairest times, and how to keep both sides in the loop
Short answer: a 9-to-5 day in New York and a 9-to-5 day in Bangalore never touch. The fairest time from the East Coast is 7:30 AM in New York, 6 PM in India from November to mid-March, and 8 AM in New York, 5:30 PM in India the rest of the year. From California, meet at the end of your day: 6 PM in San Francisco is 7:30 AM the next morning in India in winter, and 6:30 PM is 7 AM in summer.
Everything here assumes a working day of 9 to 5 in each city, and is worked out from the same time zone data your phone uses.
The numbers
| From | Apart in winter | Apart in summer | Both at work | Fairest time (winter) | Fairest time (summer) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New York | 10 h 30 min | 9 h 30 min | never | 7:30 AM / 6 PM | 8 AM / 5:30 PM |
| San Francisco | 13 h 30 min | 12 h 30 min | never | 6 PM / 7:30 AM next day | 6:30 PM / 7 AM next day |
| London | 5 h 30 min | 4 h 30 min | 2½ hours in winter, 3½ in summer | 10 AM / 3:30 PM | 10 AM / 2:30 PM |
All of India keeps one clock — Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai alike — so the same numbers hold for each.
Why the gap changes, and why it ends in :30
India keeps Indian Standard Time, five and a half hours ahead of UTC, all year. It does not change its clocks. The US does, on the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday of November, and the UK on the last Sundays of March and October. So the gap from India to New York is 10½ hours in winter and 9½ in summer. A call booked from New York at 7:30 AM, 6 PM in Bangalore all winter, lands at 5 PM in Bangalore from the second Sunday of March — and one booked from India at 6 PM moves the other way, from 7:30 to 8:30 AM in New York.
The half hour is the other trap. A meeting "on the hour" for one side is always at half past for the other. Put both times in the invite title — "8 AM ET / 5:30 PM IST" — and nobody joins thirty minutes late.
Make the bad hour rare
Somebody is early or late in every US–India call. A few habits keep that from wearing people down:
- Rotate who takes it. Early for New York one week, late for Bangalore the next. A standing slot that always falls on the same side tells that side something.
- Keep the live call for what needs to be live. Decisions, disagreements, a review of something hard. Status updates can be written and read.
- Hand over at the edges of the day. The US end-of-day note is India's start-of-day reading; India's end-of-day note is the US morning's. Two short notes a day often replace a daily meeting.
- Let people book you in their own time. A booking link shows your open times in the visitor's own time zone, so nobody does the maths and nobody picks 7 AM their time thinking it was yours.
Make the call count for the people who missed it
With no shared hours, someone is always asleep for part of the conversation that matters. What they need the next morning is not "the team discussed the release" but who said what, and what each person agreed to do.
Meetful writes every line of a call under the name of whoever said it — each person's microphone is transcribed on its own, so nothing is guessed from one mixed recording — and has the summary and the action items ready when you hang up. It is free, it runs in the browser, and guests join from a link with no account. Live captions can be shown in each person's own language while everyone keeps speaking theirs.
Look up any two cities
For any pair — when both are at work, the easiest time, an hour-by-hour table and every date in the coming year the clocks change — see Best time to meet: New York and Bangalore, San Francisco and Bangalore, London and Bangalore. For more than two cities at once there is the free time zone planner.
Read next
Sources
- NIST, Daylight Saving Time — the US rule: second Sunday in March to first Sunday in November (checked 10 November 2026)
- IANA, Time Zone Database — Asia/Kolkata at UTC+5:30 with no clock changes, and the data every time and gap above is computed from