Time in Pakistan — regions, cities and time zones

Current time in Islamabad

Pakistan uses a single zone, Pakistan Standard Time, at UTC+05:00. Daylight saving is not currently observed. Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar and Quetta all keep the same clock, from the Arabian Sea to the northern mountains.

One clock for a country of many climates

Pakistan stretches from the coastline of Sindh and Balochistan to the high Karakoram in the north, and from the Iranian border in the west to the Indian border in the east. All of it runs on UTC+05:00. The east-west spread is real — sunrise reaches Lahore appreciably before it reaches Gwadar — but a single national zone has been the settled arrangement.

Islamabad, the purpose-built capital in the north near the Margalla Hills, sets the official clock. Karachi, far to the south and by some margin the largest city, follows it, as does everywhere in between.

Pakistan and India share a long border and a five-hundred-mile stretch of the same daylight, yet their clocks differ by thirty minutes. Half-hour offsets exist mostly to remind you to check.

Zone summary

Standard time: Pakistan Standard Time, UTC+05:00 Daylight saving: not currently observed IANA zone identifier: Asia/Karachi Capital: Islamabad Largest city: Karachi

A brief experiment with summer time

Pakistan has tried daylight saving in the past, introducing it for a short period and then abandoning it. It is not in force today, and the country has kept a fixed offset since. Anyone processing historical timestamps from Pakistan should be aware that a small number of past dates fall inside those experimental periods, when the offset differed from the present one. For anything current, UTC+05:00 applies without exception.

Provinces and territories

Pakistan's administrative divisions all share the national time: Punjab, the most populous province, with Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi and Multan. Sindh in the south, centred on Karachi and Hyderabad.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the north-west, with Peshawar. Balochistan in the west and south-west, the largest province by area, with Quetta. Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Jammu and Kashmir in the far north. The Islamabad Capital Territory, holding the federal government.

Balochistan alone covers a vast area with a small population, and its western edge experiences solar noon well after Punjab does. The clock papers over that difference, as national time zones generally do.

Neighbours and half-hour gaps

Pakistan's regional relationships involve some awkward arithmetic, because two of its neighbours use offsets that are not whole hours apart from it: India is thirty minutes ahead, at UTC+05:30. Iran, to the west, uses UTC+03:30, an hour and a half behind. Afghanistan, sharing a long north-western border, is at UTC+04:30, thirty minutes behind Pakistan. China, to the north-east across the Karakoram, runs a single national clock at UTC+08:00, three hours ahead — the largest single jump at any Pakistani border.

Since none of these countries currently uses daylight saving, all of these gaps are constant through the year.