| CITY | LOCAL TIME | Difference | Coming up |
|---|---|---|---|
| London United Kingdom | 01:00 | −2h | |
| Berlin Germany | 02:00 | −1h | |
| Dubai UAE | 04:00 | +1h | Becomes +2h on 25 Oct |
| Tokyo Japan | 09:00 | +6h | Becomes +7h on 25 Oct |
| Sydney Australia | 10:00 | +7h | Becomes +8h on 4 Oct |
| New York United States | 20:00Wed | −7h | Becomes −6h on 24 Oct |
| Los Angeles United States | 17:00Wed | −10h | Becomes −9h on 24 Oct |
Sofia, Bulgaria runs on UTC+3. Clocks move forward each spring and back each autumn: UTC+2 in winter, UTC+3 in summer. Next change: 25 Oct. The time difference between Sofia and New York is 7 hours. Standard 9-to-6 working hours overlap for about 2 hours a day with New York. A good time to connect: 16:00–18:00 in Sofia lines up with 09:00–11:00 in New York. The time difference between Sofia and London is 2 hours. Standard 9-to-6 working hours overlap for about 7 hours a day with London. A good time to connect: 11:00–18:00 in Sofia lines up with 09:00–16:00 in London. The time difference between Sofia and Tokyo is 6 hours. Standard 9-to-6 working hours overlap for about 3 hours a day with Tokyo. A good time to connect: 09:00–12:00 in Sofia lines up with 15:00–18:00 in Tokyo. This timezone is also shared with cities such as Athens, Cairo, Beirut. Keeping these offsets in mind makes it easier to schedule calls or travel to and from Sofia.
Sofia (Bulgaria) is home to roughly 1.3M people. Today brings about 11.8 hours of daylight: sunrise at 07:22, sunset at 19:10. Clocks move forward each spring and back each autumn: UTC+2 in winter, UTC+3 in summer. Next change: 25 Oct. It sits in the Northern Hemisphere, about 43° north of the equator. Traffic drives on the right.
Flag
Bulgaria
Capital
Sofia 👑
Continent
Europe
Time Zone
UTC+3 · Europe/Sofia
Coordinates
42.70°N, 23.32°E
Currency
EUR (€)
Calling Code
+359
Driving Side
Right
Hemisphere
Northern
Language
Bulgarian
Measurement System
Metric
Did You Know?
Serdica lies directly beneath Sofia, and excavations for the metro in the 2010s uncovered roughly 9,000 square metres of Roman streets and buildings. Rather than remove them, the city built the station around them and left them open to the air.
The clock: Sofia keeps UTC+2. The city's motto, on its coat of arms, translates as "it grows but does not age", which the metro dig made unusually literal.
Sofia lies at 23.3°E. Its time zone, UTC+2, is built around the 30°E meridian. The 6.7° gap between them means the clock runs roughly 27 minutes ahead of the sun: solar noon arrives at about 12:27 rather than 12:00. Under daylight saving the clocks move 60 minutes forward, widening the gap to 87 minutes and pushing solar noon to 13:27.
The longest day of 2026 is 22 June, with 15h 20m of daylight. The shortest is 22 December, with 9h 2m. The swing between them is 6h 17m. This is the latitude band where the difference between summer and winter evenings is most obvious.
The earliest sunrise and the latest sunset do not land on the longest day. In Sofia the sun comes up earliest on 16 June at 05:48, while the latest sunset waits until 28 June at 21:09. The equation of time is what separates them: the Earth's elliptical orbit and axial tilt move solar noon back and forth by several minutes over the year.
The sky stays usably light for a while after the sun goes down. In Sofia that civil twilight runs about 28 minutes at the equinox, stretching to 35 minutes at the solstice.
Every figure in this section is computed from the city's own latitude, longitude and IANA time zone using NOAA solar algorithms (Spencer, 1971), accurate to about ±2 arcminutes below 65° latitude.
The official timezone for Sofia, Bulgaria is Europe/Sofia with a current UTC offset of UTC+3.
Sofia has an estimated population of 1.3M and is located at coordinates 42.70°N, 23.32°E. It is the capital city of Bulgaria.
Sofia gets 15h 20m of daylight on its longest day and 9h 2m on its shortest, averaging 12h 13m a day across the year.
Solar noon in Sofia falls at about 12:27 on UTC+2 standard time, because the city sits 6.7° from the meridian its zone is built on.
A Capital Built on a Roman City: Serdica lies directly beneath Sofia, and excavations for the metro in the 2010s uncovered roughly 9,000 square metres of Roman streets and buildings.