São Paulo
UTC−3Brazil · BRT
Thu, 13 Aug 2026
Timezone Guide
São Paulo, Brazil runs on UTC−3. This time zone stays fixed year-round at UTC−3 — daylight saving time is not observed. There is a 1-hour difference between São Paulo and New York. Standard 9-to-6 working hours overlap for about 8 hours a day with New York. A good time to connect: 10:00–18:00 in São Paulo lines up with 09:00–17:00 in New York. There is a 4-hour difference between São Paulo and London. Standard 9-to-6 working hours overlap for about 5 hours a day with London. A good time to connect: 09:00–14:00 in São Paulo lines up with 13:00–18:00 in London. There is a 12-hour difference between São Paulo and Tokyo. Standard working hours don't overlap at all with Tokyo, so meetings need an early or late slot on one side. This timezone is also shared with cities such as Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Brasília. Keeping these offsets in mind makes it easier to schedule calls or travel to and from São Paulo.
Practical Info
São Paulo (Brazil) is home to roughly 22.4M people. Today brings about 10.8 hours of daylight: sunrise at 06:42, sunset at 17:30. This time zone stays fixed year-round at UTC−3 — daylight saving time is not observed. It sits in the Southern Hemisphere, about 24° south of the equator. Traffic drives on the right.
Flag
Brazil
Capital
Brasília
Continent
South America
Time Zone
BRT · America/Sao_Paulo
Coordinates
23.50°S, 46.63°W
Currency
BRL (R$)
Calling Code
+55
Driving Side
Right
Hemisphere
Southern
Language
Portuguese
Measurement System
Metric
Did You Know?
São Paulo Simply Flies Over the Problem
São Paulo operates the largest civil helicopter fleet on Earth — roughly 411 registered aircraft, ahead of New York, Tokyo and London. They move between more than 260 rooftop helipads, and at peak the city handles around 2,200 take-offs and landings a day. That is one rotor movement roughly every forty-five seconds.
The traffic beneath them is the explanation. In 2014 São Paulo set a record with a queue measuring 344 kilometres. From Alphaville on the outskirts to Avenida Paulista in the financial core takes about seven minutes by helicopter and up to two hours by car. Executives are not buying glamour. They are buying back an hour and fifty-three minutes.
The system got so dense that Brazil's Air Force built São Paulo a dedicated air traffic control service exclusively for helicopters — the only one of its kind in the world. There was a period around 2010 when a majority of the city's helipads weren't even registered with anybody.
The clock: in 2019 Brazil abolished daylight saving time. The official reasoning was that the savings had quietly evaporated: air conditioning had replaced lighting as the thing the country switched on, and air conditioning does not care what the clock says.
Combine that decision with geography and something counterintuitive falls out. São Paulo sits almost exactly on the Tropic of Capricorn, which caps its longest day of the year at roughly 13 hours 25 minutes. In January — the absolute peak of Brazilian summer — it is dark by around seven in the evening.
So a midsummer evening in the largest city in the southern hemisphere is finished before a June evening in London has properly got going. São Paulo has the climate for long summer nights and, since 2019, has formally declined to have any.
Sources
- ANAC (Brezilya sivil havacılık otoritesi) ve ABRAPHE (Brezilya Helikopter Pilotları Derneği) verileri, Rio Times ve BisAviation üzerinden
- Found and Explained (2014 trafik rekoru, 344 km)
- Panos Pictures / Latin America Bureau (Alphaville–Paulista karşılaştırması; 2010'da 215 helipadın 129'unun kayıtsız olması)
Annual Daylight
Working Hours
3h overlap