Georgetown, Guyana · UTC-4 ☆

Georgetown is the capital of Guyana and runs on Guyana Time, UTC-4, year-round. No daylight saving. The clock is fixed.

Guyana’s timezone history is unusual. The country used UTC-3:45 until 1975, one of the last non-standard offsets in the western hemisphere. After independence from Britain in 1966, the country gradually reformed its time standards, and the shift to UTC-4 aligned it more cleanly with regional neighbors.

At UTC-4, Georgetown shares its offset with Halifax in Canada’s maritime provinces, though Guyana stays on UTC-4 year-round while Halifax shifts with daylight saving. Georgetown also shares its clock with Manaus in Brazil and parts of the Amazon basin.

A coastal city below sea level

Georgetown sits on the Atlantic coast at about 6 degrees North latitude, mostly below sea level, protected by a seawall the Dutch built in the colonial era. The city gets intense tropical sun with minimal seasonal variation in day length. Solar noon falls around 12:15pm, making UTC-4 a reasonable fit.

Colonial clocks and cricket schedules

Guyana was British Guiana until 1966. The British administration brought standard time and cricket. Both persist. Georgetown’s Bourda Cricket Ground, opened in 1884, hosted international matches on schedules set by the colonial calendar. The cricket season, tied to the dry season and school holidays, remains a structure that organizes time in ways that official policy never quite captures.

Convert 9am Georgetown time to other cities.

Sources

• IANA Time Zone Database
• Bureau of Statistics Guyana
• Daly, Vere T. A Short History of the Guyanese People. Macmillan, 1975.