GMT+14 Time Zone Countries list - UTC+14 Time Now

The first place on Earth to reach a new date

No clock runs further ahead than UTC+14. When the Line Islands begin a new day, the rest of the world has up to twenty-six hours to wait — the gap to UTC-12, the furthest-behind offset, is a full day plus two hours.

This makes Kiritimati, also called Christmas Island, the first inhabited place to enter each new year. It is not a large place; the distinction is entirely a matter of where the date line was drawn. Kiritimati and the rest of the Line Islands, Kiribati — year round Samoa and Tokelau — only if daylight saving is observed in a given year

How Kiribati ended up here

Kiribati spans an enormous stretch of the central Pacific, and for years its eastern and western islands sat on opposite sides of the International Date Line. Government offices in one part of the country shared only four working days a week with offices in another.

Kiribati resolved this by moving the date line east, around the far edge of its territory, so the whole nation shares a calendar date. The clock offsets still differ — UTC+12 in the Gilberts, UTC+13 in the Phoenix group, UTC+14 in the Line Islands — but the date no longer does.

The date line is not a line of longitude. It is a negotiated shape, and every kink in it is a country that decided which of its neighbours it would rather share a Monday with.

Daylight saving at the extreme

The Line Islands do not observe daylight saving and have no reason to: they lie almost on the equator, where the length of daylight barely changes from month to month. UTC+14 is their standard time and stays so through the year.

The only way other places reach UTC+14 is by adding daylight saving to UTC+13. Samoa and Tokelau sit at UTC+13 as standard time and have used a summer shift in the past, though it is not currently a fixed annual practice and should be verified rather than assumed for any given year.

Working with the furthest clock

The practical difficulty of UTC+14 is not the hour but the date. Nearly every conversation with the Line Islands crosses a calendar boundary, and "tomorrow" means different things at each end of the call.

Write dates as well as times, always, and say which zone each belongs to. Remember that a Friday deadline set in Europe has already passed in Kiribati by Thursday evening European time. In software, use Pacific/Kiritimati rather than a hardcoded offset.