Thimphu, Bhutan · UTC+6
Convert time from Thimphu
Thimphu is in the Bhutan Time zone (BTT/UTC+6). Bhutan maintains a fixed offset year-round with no daylight saving time.
Thimphu is one of the few national capitals in the world with no traffic lights. The city tried them briefly in 1999, found that residents preferred the white-gloved traffic police who had always guided intersections, and removed them. The story is possibly apocryphal but widely repeated, and it captures something true about Bhutan’s relationship with modernization on its own terms.
Bhutan keeps Bhutan Standard Time, UTC+6, year-round, with no daylight saving. The offset places Thimphu between India (UTC+5:30) and Bangladesh (UTC+6) in the timezone neighborhood. Like many South Asian countries, Bhutan has opted out of the semi-annual clock change.
Thimphu sits at about 2300 meters elevation in a valley in the Himalayas, at 27 degrees north latitude. The city gets genuine seasonal variation in daylight. The mountains compress it further: in deep winter, the surrounding peaks can block direct sunlight from valley floors for hours in the morning and afternoon even when the sky above is clear.
Gross National Happiness and time use
The country’s Gross National Happiness index, introduced in the 1970s by the Fourth King, measures wellbeing across domains including time use. Survey questions ask explicitly how people spend their days, making time allocation a formal matter of national policy in a way it is nowhere else.
9am in Thimphu is 3am in London. Tsirang in southern Bhutan shares the same Bhutan Time.
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Read more about time in Bhutan →Same time as Thimphu
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Questions about time in Thimphu
- What timezone is Thimphu in?
- Thimphu uses the IANA timezone
Asia/Thimphu. The UTC offset is always UTC+6 - this timezone does not observe daylight saving time. - Does Thimphu observe daylight saving time?
- No. Thimphu does not observe daylight saving time. The UTC offset remains UTC+6 all year round.
- What is the current UTC offset for Thimphu?
- Thimphu is currently at UTC+6.
- What is the time difference between Thimphu and New York?
- Thimphu is currently 10 hours ahead of New York.
- What is the time difference between Thimphu and London?
- Thimphu is currently 5 hours ahead of London.
- What is the time difference between Thimphu and Los Angeles?
- Thimphu is currently 13 hours ahead of Los Angeles.
- What is the time difference between Thimphu and Tokyo?
- Thimphu is currently 3 hours behind Tokyo.
- What is the IANA timezone name for Thimphu?
- The IANA timezone database identifier for Thimphu is
Asia/Thimphu. Use this string in programming languages and APIs: JavaScript (`new Intl.DateTimeFormat('en-US', { timeZone: 'Asia/Thimphu' })`), Python (`pytz.timezone('Asia/Thimphu')`), or any IANA-compatible library.