What time is it in Kaohsiung, Takao, Taiwan
Kaohsiung uses Taiwan’s National Standard Time, UTC+8, all year. Read the city’s local hour here, with sunrise, sunset, and current weather.
Kaohsiung, Taiwan
Friday, 4 September 2026
UTC+8 · Asia/Taipei
Local time in Kaohsiung
UTC+8 · no daylight saving time
The sun today
Sunrise 05:43 Solar noon 11:59 Sunset 18:15 Daylight 12 h 32 min Night 11 h 28 min Civil twilight 05:20 – 18:38
Weather in Kaohsiung right now
Loading the current weather…
Weather data by Open-Meteo, updated every 30 minutes.
Kaohsiung and its neighbours
Largest cities in Takao
- Fengshan 356 463
Same time zone — Asia/Taipei
- Taipei Taiwan
- New Taipei City Taiwan
- Taichung Taiwan
- Tainan Taiwan
Nearby places
- Shanwei — 17.7 km
- Xishan — 17.9 km
- Dongshan — 18.0 km
- Dongshan Village — 18.1 km
- Zhongshan Village — 18.2 km
- Yanbu — 19.0 km
What time is it in Kaohsiung
Kaohsiung is a port city in southern Taiwan. On this site it is filed under Takao, an older name for the same coastal region. Civil time is National Standard Time, eight hours ahead of UTC. Clocks do not spring forward. A January watch and a July watch keep the same relationship to Coordinated Universal Time.
The usual computer identifier is Asia/Taipei. That name covers the whole island, not a northern-only clock. If a form offers Taipei, Taiwan, or Asia/Taipei, that is the setting for Kaohsiung as well. There is no separate harbour zone, and there is no district-level offset between the port, the downtown, and the hillside neighbourhoods.
Mainland China also uses UTC+8, so a call with Xiamen or Shenzhen needs no arithmetic. The IANA names differ — Asia/Taipei here, Asia/Shanghai there — because they are different jurisdictions, not because the present offset disagrees. Write the city name anyway. “China time” is the wrong label for a Kaohsiung appointment even when the numbers match.
Harbour city on an island hour
The Port of Kaohsiung, the Love River, and the coastal districts all run on the same civil hour. A ferry, a metro ride, or a trip into the hills does not buy a new zone. What it buys is a different view of the horizon. Ships, cranes, and cloud can hide the first gleam of the sun while the clock still prints the calculated minute.
Set devices to Asia/Taipei or to National Standard Time, UTC+8. Leave daylight saving off; Taiwan does not currently shift the clock. Use Kaohsiung’s coordinates for sunrise, sunset, and weather, not a pin dropped on Taipei.
On mixed invites, write “Kaohsiung (UTC+8)” so the hour is not filed under a mainland city name by habit. Taipei, Tainan, and Hualien share this offset exactly. You do not convert clocks to call another city on the island. You do convert to call Japan (UTC+9) or Vietnam (UTC+7). Whole-hour neighbours are the usual source of error, not Kaohsiung’s own clock. Takao on a map is a name. UTC+8 on a clock is the appointment.
Southern light over the strait
Sunrise and sunset here are computed for Kaohsiung’s location and the chosen date. They will not match Taipei to the minute, because the cities do not share a latitude or a longitude. They also will not punch through summer rain or a bank of strait haze. Astronomical sunrise assumes a clear, flat horizon that a working harbour does not actually possess.
Kaohsiung sits well south on the island, so dawn and dusk do not leap as far through the year as they do in Taipei. They still wander. Copying a June sunrise onto a December plan is how people miss the light, even when they have the zone right.
Twilight still matters for waterfront walks and for the feel of an early sailing. First light precedes the stamp; full dark arrives after dusk, not at the minute of sunset. If you need the sky bright enough to see unlit paths, use twilight and the weather, not a single sunset figure alone.
Monsoon weather, steady offset
Southern Taiwan has a tropical monsoon climate. The warm months are typically hot, humid, and wet; the cooler months are milder than a northern winter. Typhoons and their outer bands can disrupt outdoor plans and harbour work without touching the civil hour. The weather line here reports what the harbour sky is doing now. It is not a storm warning by itself and not a seasonal chart you can paste onto next week.
Indoor meetings stay on UTC+8. Outdoor loading, night markets, and photography should start from rain, wind, and heat as well. A 14:00 appointment in a dry spell and a 14:00 appointment under a typhoon warning are the same clock and different days. The offset will not delay itself for the wind.
A counterpart in London or New York may still move their clocks with the seasons. Kaohsiung will not. If a recurring call suddenly feels early or late, look at the other country’s daylight-saving date before you rewrite the Kaohsiung side. Keep the event tagged as Asia/Taipei so only their display moves.
Questions and answers
- What time zone is Kaohsiung in?
- National Standard Time, UTC+8, the same official hour as the rest of Taiwan.
- Does Kaohsiung use a different clock from Taipei?
- No. The island keeps one civil offset. Sunrise minutes still differ by place.
- Is Kaohsiung on China Standard Time?
- The present offset matches UTC+8, but the civil name and the IANA zone are Taiwan’s, not the mainland’s.