Amsterdam
UTC+2Netherlands · CEST
Thu, 13 Aug 2026
Timezone Guide
Amsterdam, Netherlands runs on UTC+2. Clocks move forward each spring and back each autumn: UTC+1 in winter, UTC+2 in summer. Next change: 25 Oct. There is a 6-hour difference between Amsterdam and New York. Standard 9-to-6 working hours overlap for about 3 hours a day with New York. A good time to connect: 15:00–18:00 in Amsterdam lines up with 09:00–12:00 in New York. There is a 1-hour difference between Amsterdam and London. Standard 9-to-6 working hours overlap for about 8 hours a day with London. A good time to connect: 10:00–18:00 in Amsterdam lines up with 09:00–17:00 in London. There is a 7-hour difference between Amsterdam and Tokyo. Standard 9-to-6 working hours overlap for about 2 hours a day with Tokyo. A good time to connect: 09:00–11:00 in Amsterdam lines up with 16:00–18:00 in Tokyo. This timezone is also shared with cities such as Madrid, Paris, Rome. Keeping these offsets in mind makes it easier to schedule calls or travel to and from Amsterdam.
Practical Info
Amsterdam (Netherlands) is home to roughly 1.1M people. Today brings about 16.7 hours of daylight: sunrise at 05:18, sunset at 22:00. Clocks move forward each spring and back each autumn: UTC+1 in winter, UTC+2 in summer. Next change: 25 Oct. It sits in the Northern Hemisphere, about 52° north of the equator. Traffic drives on the right.
Flag
Netherlands
Capital
Amsterdam 👑
Continent
Europe
Time Zone
CEST · Europe/Amsterdam
Coordinates
52.37°N, 4.90°E
Currency
EUR (€)
Calling Code
+31
Driving Side
Right
Hemisphere
Northern
Language
Dutch
Measurement System
Metric
Did You Know?
Amsterdam Fishes Fifteen Thousand Bicycles Out of the Water Every Year
Amsterdam holds a Guinness World Record for most bicycles recovered from waterways. Between 12,000 and 15,000 bikes are pulled out of the canals annually by Waternet, the city's water authority, using a hydraulic claw mounted on a crane on a barge.
The practice has its own name — fietsen vissen, bicycle fishing — and it has become a spectator activity. The claw comes up dripping with frames and handlebars and wheels, a crowd gathers, and the haul goes off to be scrapped.
For scale: Amsterdam had around 847,000 bicycles as of 2015, in a city with fewer residents than that. There are 165 canals, about 100 kilometres of water, and around 1,000 bridges. Waternet's diving colleagues also recover, on average, about 35 cars and 100 people from the canals each year.
Most of the bikes go in through theft or vandalism. But not all of it is petty. In the 1930s, Amsterdam communists threw fascists' bicycles into the Prinsengracht. And during the German occupation, resistance leaders urged Amsterdammers to dump their own bikes in the canals rather than let the occupying forces confiscate them.
Which brings us to the clock.
The clock: in 1908 the Dutch parliament passed a law defining the legal time of the entire country as the mean solar time at the Westertoren — a church tower in Amsterdam. It came into force on 1 May 1909, at GMT plus nineteen minutes and 32.13 seconds. The .13 is in the statute. An entire nation set its watch by one steeple, to a hundredth of a second.
On 1 July 1937 it was rounded off to a tidy twenty minutes.
On 16 May 1940, the occupying German forces advanced Dutch clocks to Berlin time.
The Netherlands never took it back. After liberation in 1945 the country kept Central European Time, and keeps it today. The bicycles went into the canals so the occupier could not have them, and the bicycles were eventually fished back out. The clock was not.
One trace survives. Every time zone database in the world — including the one running this website — still carries a line reading `0:19:32` for Europe/Amsterdam, so that historical dates convert correctly. Somewhere in the software of the entire planet, a Dutch church tower is still keeping time.
Sources
- Guinness World Records, *Most bicycles recovered from waterways (city)* (12.000–15.000/yıl; 847.000 bisiklet; 35 araba ve 100 insan)
- DutchAmsterdam.nl (Waternet, Arie Beer röportajı; 165 kanal / 100 km)
- Wikipedia, *UTC+00:20* ve IANA tz veritabanı `Europe/Amsterdam` girdisi (0:19:32,13; 1 Temmuz 1937 yuvarlaması; 16 Mayıs 1940 işgal değişikliği)
- Grokipedia, *Time in the Netherlands* (1908 tarihli yasa, Staatsblad 1908 no. 236, Westertoren)
Annual Daylight
Working Hours
8h overlap