Johannesburg
UTC+2South Africa · SAST
Thu, 13 Aug 2026
Timezone Guide
Johannesburg, South Africa runs on UTC+2. This time zone stays fixed year-round at UTC+2 — daylight saving time is not observed. There is a 6-hour difference between Johannesburg 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 Johannesburg lines up with 09:00–12:00 in New York. There is a 1-hour difference between Johannesburg 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 Johannesburg lines up with 09:00–17:00 in London. There is a 7-hour difference between Johannesburg 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 Johannesburg lines up with 16:00–18:00 in Tokyo. This timezone is also shared with cities such as Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam. Keeping these offsets in mind makes it easier to schedule calls or travel to and from Johannesburg.
Practical Info
Johannesburg (South Africa) is home to roughly 5.8M people. Today brings about 10.4 hours of daylight: sunrise at 07:06, sunset at 17:30. This time zone stays fixed year-round at UTC+2 — daylight saving time is not observed. It sits in the Southern Hemisphere, about 26° south of the equator. Traffic drives on the left.
Flag
South Africa
Capital
Pretoria
Continent
Africa
Time Zone
SAST · Africa/Johannesburg
Coordinates
26.20°S, 28.04°E
Currency
ZAR (R)
Calling Code
+27
Driving Side
Left
Hemisphere
Southern
Language
English
Measurement System
Metric
Did You Know?
The Longest Commute on This List Is Ninety Minutes and Goes Straight Down
West of Johannesburg, in the Witwatersrand Basin, is the Mponeng mine. It is the deepest mine on Earth, running more than four kilometres below the surface.
About 4,000 miners descend every day. They ride in multi-stage cages carrying up to 120 people at a time, at speeds around 60 km/h, and the journey from daylight to the working face takes over an hour — some accounts put it at ninety minutes. That is a commute measured in vertical kilometres.
Conditions down there are governed by the planet's geothermal gradient: roughly 30°C hotter per kilometre of depth. Rock walls reach 60°C and above, and humidity often exceeds 95%. To make it survivable, the mine pumps more than 6,000 tonnes of ice slurry into underground reservoirs and runs enormous fans.
Each day the operation uses around 2,300 kg of explosives and removes some 6,400 tonnes of rock. Some working spaces are 60 centimetres wide. The gold-bearing reef they are chasing is 2.7 billion years old.
Johannesburg itself has no river, no harbour and no lake. It is one of the very few major cities on Earth with no natural reason to exist. It is there because in 1886 somebody found gold, and within a decade there was a city.
The clock: above ground, Johannesburg keeps unusually honest time. South Africa runs on UTC+2, built for the 30th meridian, and Johannesburg sits at 28° east — meaning its clock is within about eight minutes of its own sun. On a list that includes cities running an hour ahead of theirs, that is close to perfect.
Below ground, something stranger is true. Clocks deeper inside a gravitational field genuinely run slower than clocks above them — this is ordinary general relativity, and modern atomic clocks can measure the difference across height changes of a few tens of centimetres.
So four kilometres down, at the bottom of Mponeng, time is passing very slightly more slowly than it is at the surface. The effect is far too small for any miner to notice, and it is not a metaphor. It is simply the case.
Johannesburg may be the only city on this list where the lift is, technically, a time machine.
Sources
- Guinness World Records, *Deepest mine* (4 km üzeri; 6.000 ton buz bulamacı; günlük ~2.300 kg patlayıcı ve 6.400 ton kaya)
- Wikipedia, *Mponeng Gold Mine* (yüzeyden en derin noktaya bir saatten uzun yolculuk)
- IFLScience ve Mining.com (4.000 madenci; 60°C kaya sıcaklığı; %95 nem)
- Harmony Gold resmî sayfası
- Boylam hesabı: Johannesburg 28,05°D, UTC+2 meridyeni 30°D → ~8 dakika
Annual Daylight
Working Hours
8h overlap