Official German Time

What “official” German time means

Germany's legal time is not a matter of opinion — it is defined by law and realised by the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Braunschweig, the country's national metrology institute. Its caesium atomic clocks keep Germany's official time, which is then distributed through the DCF77 longwave transmitter near Frankfurt and through public network time servers. Every radio-controlled clock in the country is ultimately listening to that signal.

The clock on this page reads the time from our web server, which is itself kept in step by NTP. Your browser then counts on from there and re-checks with the server every few minutes, so the seconds you see stay honest even if you leave the tab open all day.

One country, one time zone

Unlike large countries such as the United States or Russia, Germany runs on a single time zone from the North Sea to the Alps. Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, Dresden, Heidelberg — they all show the same time, right down to the second. That makes trip planning refreshingly simple: one clock covers your whole journey.

In winter Germany observes Central European Time (CET), one hour ahead of UTC. In summer it observes Central European Summer Time (CEST), two hours ahead. The same rhythm applies across most of continental Europe, from Spain to Poland.

When the clocks change

Summer time starts on the last Sunday in March: at 02:00 CET the clocks jump forward to 03:00 CEST, and that night is an hour shorter. It ends on the last Sunday in October: at 03:00 CEST the clocks fall back to 02:00 CET, handing you an extra hour in bed.

The European Union has been debating an end to the twice-yearly switch since 2018, and the European Parliament voted in favour of abolishing it in 2019. Member states have never agreed on which time to keep permanently, however, so the changeover is still with us. The dates shown on this page come straight from the international time zone database, so they will follow along automatically if the rules ever do change.

Working out the difference from home

If you are calling or booking from abroad, the arithmetic is simple once you know the offset. During summer, German time is UTC+2: six hours ahead of New York, nine ahead of Los Angeles, one ahead of London, and seven behind Sydney. During winter, subtract one hour from each of those figures. Bear in mind that other countries shift their own clocks on different dates, so for a couple of weeks each spring and autumn the usual difference is off by an hour.

Link to this clock

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