Time in Bermuda — regions, cities and time zones

Current time in Hamilton

Hamilton, on the shore of the harbour that shares its name, is Bermuda's capital and the centre of its business district. A useful piece of local trivia for anyone reading a map: the City of Hamilton lies in Pembroke Parish, while Hamilton Parish is a separate place further along the island. Both keep identical time, so the mix-up costs you nothing on the clock — only in directions.

St George's in the east, Somerset in the west and everywhere between read exactly the same. Bermuda is a chain of small islands connected by bridges and causeways, and the whole of it functions as one time zone.

Clock changes follow North America

This is the detail that catches people out. Bermuda sits alone in the Atlantic, far from the American mainland, but it changes its clocks on the North American schedule, not the European one: forward on the second Sunday in March, back on the first Sunday in November.

What that produces in practice: Bermuda is consistently one hour ahead of New York, Toronto and Miami, all year, because both sides shift on the same dates. The gap to London and Dublin is not consistent. For most of the year it is four hours, but during the weeks when North America has changed and Europe has not — and vice versa — it is three or five.

Bermuda shares its offset with much of the eastern Caribbean during the winter, then drifts an hour ahead of them in summer, since most Caribbean islands do not use daylight saving. Bermuda looks Atlantic and clocks American. Check the calendar, not the map, before you dial.

Parishes on a single clock

Bermuda is divided into nine parishes, plus two municipalities. The parishes, running roughly west to east, are Sandys, Southampton, Warwick, Paget, Pembroke, Devonshire, Smith's, Hamilton and St George's. The two municipalities are the City of Hamilton and the Town of St George. Every one of them uses the same offset — the territory is only about thirty-five kilometres end to end, so nothing else would make sense.

Working with Bermuda time

Bermuda's finance and reinsurance sectors work closely with New York and London, and the one-hour-ahead-of-New-York relationship is the anchor most schedules are built on. A morning slot in Hamilton overlaps comfortably with the London afternoon; a Hamilton afternoon overlaps with the whole US East Coast working day.

For software and calendars, use the zone identifier Atlantic/Bermuda. A fixed −4 will silently drift during the daylight saving period, and a fixed −3 will be wrong for the rest of the year. If you are writing a time down for someone else, quoting the equivalent in Eastern Time is often the clearest option, because that relationship never changes.