Seeing overlapping working hours across a remote team

Overlap matters more than the time difference

Knowing that Berlin is six hours ahead of New York tells you surprisingly little on its own. What matters is when both people are actually at their desks. With a 9 to 5 day on both sides, Berlin and New York share 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM New York time for most of the year. Two hours a day is workable for a standup and a decision or two, but not for long collaborative sessions, and knowing that number up front shapes how the team should run.

A single snapshot goes stale, too. A view that is right in November can be wrong in March, because clocks change on different dates in different places. Whatever you use to see team hours, it needs to work for the date you pick, not only for today.

Working out the overlap by hand

List each city with its UTC offset for the week in question, convert each person’s working day into UTC, then take the latest start and the earliest finish. If the start comes before the finish, the time between them is your overlap. Here is a four city team on Tuesday, November 10, 2026, with everyone working 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM local time:

London, Berlin and New York overlap from 14:00 to 17:00 UTC. That is 9:00 AM to noon in New York, 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM in London and 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM in Berlin. Bring San Francisco in and the overlap vanishes, because the latest start is 17:00 UTC, exactly when Berlin’s day ends. Someone has to stretch their day, or that conversation moves to writing.

Doing this once for four cities is fine. Redoing it every time someone joins, moves, or the clocks change is where a tool earns its place.

What a good side-by-side hours view should do

• Line every city up against the same moment, so you can scan across and see what time it is for each person.
• Shade working hours, so the overlap is visible without arithmetic.
• Apply daylight saving for the date you pick, not only for today.
• Be shareable, so the whole team is looking at the same picture.
• Work without accounts, because contractors and occasional collaborators will not sign up just to see when you are online.

Finding and sharing overlap with MeetETA

On the meeting planner, add each teammate’s city and look for the times inside everyone’s working hours. It is free with no sign-in. Then move to a date in the other season and check again, so you can see how the overlap shifts after a clock change.

For an always visible view, use Clocks. Add the team’s cities and choose Copy link. The link carries the list of cities, so anyone who opens it sees the same clocks, and it is worth pinning in your team chat. Cities are saved in your browser without an account, and signing in with Google syncs them across your devices.

Each teammate with an account can also publish their own hours. A personal link at meeteta.com/u/ followed by their handle shows their time zone and working hours on one page, which helps new hires and contractors understand when to expect a reply.

How the overlap moves through the year

Clock changes reshape overlap for any team that spans regions with different rules. Take a team split between New York and Bengaluru, both working 9 to 6. In winter, 9:00 AM in New York is 7:30 PM in Bengaluru, so there is no overlap inside normal hours. In summer, 9:00 AM in New York is 6:30 PM in Bengaluru. There is still no shared hour, but the gap is an hour smaller, and an 8:00 AM start in New York reaches Bengaluru at 5:30 PM.

For London and New York the overlap is stable most of the year, because both sides change. During the weeks between the US and UK change dates, which in 2027 are March 14 to 27 and October 31 to November 6, New York is only four hours behind London, so the shared window grows by an hour. Teams that rely on a tight late afternoon slot in London should check those weeks in advance. The full calendar is in avoiding daylight saving mistakes when scheduling international calls.

Running a team with little or no overlap

When the shared band is small, protect it for the work that genuinely needs people together: decisions, unblocking, and the occasional difficult conversation. Everything else, including status updates, handoffs and documentation, works better written down. If an inconvenient slot is unavoidable, rotate it, so the same region is not always taking the 10 PM call. When you do need to pick one meeting time across several cities, how to find a meeting time across time zones walks through the method.

Common questions