| Time zone | Central European Time (CET/CEST) |
| UTC offset (today) | UTC+02:00 |
| Daylight saving | Berlin moves to CEST (UTC+2) on the last Sunday of March and back to CET (UTC+1) on the last Sunday of October. |
| Business hours | Offices usually work 8:00 or 9:00 to 17:00, often starting earlier than in southern Europe. Shops close on Sundays under German law, apart from a few permitted Sundays a year and station or airport stores. |
| Country | Germany |
German offices tend to begin early, and many Berlin colleagues are at their desks by 8:00. Friday afternoons often finish early as well, so a Friday 16:00 meeting may find half the team gone.
Sunday is a real day off. Supermarkets and most shops close, and Berlin residents plan their weekly shopping around that. Late openings are found at the main railway stations. Berlin sits in the east of the CET zone, so summer sunrise comes around 4:45 and December sunset as early as 15:50.
Delhi is 3h30 ahead of Berlin during CEST and 4h30 ahead during CET. A 10:00 meeting in Berlin is 13:30 or 14:30 in India, which keeps both sides within normal hours, and many German-Indian engineering teams use the Berlin morning for that reason.
New York is six hours behind for most of the year, giving a common window from about 15:00 to 18:00 Berlin time. Expect a one-week exception in late October and in March, when Europe and the US change clocks on different Sundays.
Yes. Both use CET/CEST and switch on the same dates.
Clocks go back one hour at 3:00 CEST on Sunday 25 October 2026.
Mostly no. Shops close on Sundays, with exceptions for stations, airports, petrol stations and a handful of special shopping Sundays.
· Written by Om Vaghani, ClockAura