Convert BRT (Brasília Time) to CEST (Central European Summer Time)

Best time to schedule a meeting

Standard 9–5 working hours overlap for 3 hours: 9:00 AM–12:00 PM BRT (2:00 PM–5:00 PM CEST). Schedule meetings inside that window.

BRT to CEST conversion table

About BRT

Brasília Time (BRT) is UTC−3. It is used in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and most of populated Brazil.

Brasília Time is UTC−3, covering São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasília. Brazil abolished daylight saving in 2019, so the offset is now fixed year-round — but a great deal of older software, and a lot of published advice, still assumes the southern-hemisphere shift that used to run from October to February. If a Brazilian meeting time was correct last year and is an hour out now, an out-of-date time zone database is the likely cause.

About CEST

Central European Summer Time (CEST) is UTC+2. It is used in Paris, Berlin, Madrid and Rome from late March to late October.

Central European Summer Time is UTC+2, in force from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October. The European changeover happens at 01:00 UTC everywhere simultaneously, unlike the US which changes at 2am local time in each zone — so Europe's internal offsets never break during the transition, while North America's briefly do.

Does this gap change with the seasons?

This gap is seasonal. The abbreviations themselves are fixed offsets, but the region on CEST switches to CET (UTC+1) from late October to late March. So the 5-hour figure on this page is correct for the part of the year when both places are actually on these abbreviations, and changes by an hour outside it.

BRT does not shift, so the whole change comes from one side. A recurring meeting fixed in BRT will appear to move by an hour for everyone on the other side, twice a year, without anyone changing anything.

This is the reason scheduling systems store an IANA zone such as Region/City rather than an offset or an abbreviation: the zone knows its own rules and the offset does not.

Frequently asked questions