Time in France — regions, cities and time zones

Current time in Paris

Paris runs on UTC+1 in winter and UTC+2 in summer, in step with Berlin, Madrid, Rome and Brussels. It is one hour ahead of London and Dublin all year, and the same clock covers every city in mainland France and Corsica.

Anyone travelling between London and Paris learns the rule quickly: add an hour going east. The relationship never varies, because both sides change their clocks on the same dates.

The country with the most time zones

Mainland France is one zone. France as a whole is not. Its overseas departments, collectivities and territories are scattered across the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific and the South Atlantic, and each keeps a clock suited to its own longitude. Together they give the French Republic the widest spread of official time of any state.

France is a country where it is possible, in the strictest legal sense, to be several hours late for a domestic appointment. Some of the territories with their own hour: Guadeloupe and Martinique, in the Caribbean.

French Guiana, on the South American mainland. Réunion and Mayotte, in the Indian Ocean. French Polynesia, spanning more than one offset by itself. New Caledonia and Wallis and Futuna, in the Pacific.

Saint Pierre and Miquelon, off the coast of Canada. None of these share Paris time. When a French organisation says "Paris time" it is being precise, not parochial.

Why Paris is ahead of its own sun

Look at the map and mainland France sits at longitudes that would suit UTC+0 rather better than UTC+1. The result is that solar noon in western France falls well after the clock says midday, and summer evenings stay light very late — one of the more agreeable side effects of the arrangement, and one reason there is little appetite to change it.

Brest, on the Atlantic coast, feels this most: in June the light lingers past what most visitors expect. Strasbourg, near the German border, is closer to the offset it nominally belongs to.

Regions of the mainland

All of metropolitan France and Corsica share the single zone Europe/Paris. The regions are administrative rather than temporal: Île-de-France — Paris and its surroundings. Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur — Marseille, Nice, Toulon.

Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes — Lyon and the Alps. Nouvelle-Aquitaine — Bordeaux and the south-west. Bretagne — the Atlantic west, where the clock runs furthest from the sun. Grand Est — Strasbourg and the German frontier. Corse — the island of Corsica.

Scheduling with France

The mainland is straightforward: one hour ahead of the UK and Ireland, level with most of Western and Central Europe, one hour behind Finland and the Baltic states. All of these hold year round because the change dates align.

The care is needed with the overseas territories. A call with Papeete or Cayenne is nothing like a call with Paris, and the seasonal change does not necessarily apply there. Confirm the specific territory rather than assuming French time is one number.