Vancouver
UTC−7Canada · PDT
Thu, 13 Aug 2026
Timezone Guide
Vancouver, Canada runs on UTC−7. Clocks move forward each spring and back each autumn: UTC−8 in winter, UTC−7 in summer. There is a 3-hour difference between Vancouver and New York. Standard 9-to-6 working hours overlap for about 6 hours a day with New York. A good time to connect: 09:00–15:00 in Vancouver lines up with 12:00–18:00 in New York. There is a 8-hour difference between Vancouver and London. Standard 9-to-6 working hours overlap for about 1 hours a day with London. A good time to connect: 09:00–10:00 in Vancouver lines up with 17:00–18:00 in London. There is a 16-hour difference between Vancouver and Tokyo. Standard 9-to-6 working hours overlap for about 1 hours a day with Tokyo. A good time to connect: 17:00–18:00 in Vancouver lines up with 09:00–10:00 in Tokyo. This timezone is also shared with cities such as Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas. Keeping these offsets in mind makes it easier to schedule calls or travel to and from Vancouver.
Practical Info
Vancouver (Canada) is home to roughly 2.6M people. Today brings about 16.0 hours of daylight: sunrise at 05:06, sunset at 21:06. Clocks move forward each spring and back each autumn: UTC−8 in winter, UTC−7 in summer. It sits in the Northern Hemisphere, about 49° north of the equator. Traffic drives on the right.
Flag
Canada
Capital
Ottawa
Continent
North America
Time Zone
PDT · America/Vancouver
Coordinates
49.25°N, 123.12°W
Currency
CAD ($)
Calling Code
+1
Driving Side
Right
Hemisphere
Northern
Language
English, French
Measurement System
Metric
Did You Know?
The City That Said No to the Road
In the 1960s, Vancouver was going to get a freeway. Eight lanes, elevated, entering downtown from the east and carving straight through Strathcona, Gastown and Chinatown before turning along the waterfront. It was the standard North American plan of the era. Every city was doing it.
Vancouver's residents — many of them the people whose neighbourhoods were scheduled for demolition — fought it and won. By 1972 a new city council was in office, and the freeway was dead. Today Vancouver is the only major North American city with no freeway running into or through its downtown core.
The only physical evidence that the plan ever existed is two viaducts near False Creek, built before the project collapsed, now leading confidently from nowhere to nowhere.
What replaced the freeway was an entire philosophy of city-building that planners elsewhere now call, without irony, Vancouverism. A city so committed to not being driven through that it is regularly voted one of the most liveable places on Earth. The traffic is still terrible. Nobody has ever pretended otherwise.
The clock: Vancouver sits at 49° north, and it pays for the view. The longest day of the year runs about 16 hours 15 minutes. The shortest runs about 8 hours 10 minutes. That is an eight-hour swing between June and December — the same streets, the same coordinates, operating as two different planets six months apart.
Which makes it faintly ridiculous that Vancouver still changes its clocks twice a year. British Columbia has already legislated to stop. It is waiting for the American west coast to move first, because a province cannot sensibly abandon daylight saving while Seattle is still doing it. So Vancouver waits — in the dark, at a quarter past four in the afternoon.
Sources
- CBC News, "How nixing a downtown freeway 50 years ago made Vancouver one of the world's most liveable cities"
- Literary Review of Canada, "The City That Could Have Been"
- Planetizen
Annual Daylight
Working Hours