Convert GST (Gulf Standard Time) to UTC (Coordinated Universal Time)

Best time to schedule a meeting

Standard 9–5 working hours overlap for 4 hours: 1:00 PM–5:00 PM GST (9:00 AM–1:00 PM UTC). Schedule meetings inside that window.

GST to UTC conversion table

About GST

Gulf Standard Time (GST) is UTC+4. It is used in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Muscat.

Gulf Standard Time is UTC+4, covering the United Arab Emirates and Oman, and there is no daylight saving anywhere on the Arabian peninsula. The scheduling complication in the region is not the clock but the week: the UAE moved its weekend to Saturday–Sunday in 2022, while Saudi Arabia and several neighbours keep Friday–Saturday, so a Thursday afternoon meeting lands differently across a border that has no time difference at all.

About UTC

Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is UTC+0. It is used in the global time standard, used by aviation, computing and science.

UTC is not a time zone. It is the reference all the others are defined against, and no country runs its civil clocks on it — the places at UTC+0 are on GMT or WET, which are separate things that happen to agree in winter. It never changes for daylight saving, which is exactly why servers, aviation, and every log file you will ever read are timestamped in it. The one irregularity is the leap second, inserted to keep UTC within a second of the Earth's rotation; the practice is due to be abandoned by 2035.

Does this gap change with the seasons?

Neither GST nor UTC shifts with the seasons, so this 4-hour difference holds all year. That is unusual enough to be worth relying on: most cross-continental gaps move twice a year.

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