| Time zone | Central European Time (CET/CEST) |
| UTC offset (today) | UTC+02:00 |
| Daylight saving | Paris moves to CEST (UTC+2) on the last Sunday of March and returns to CET (UTC+1) on the last Sunday of October. |
| Business hours | Offices usually run 9:00 to 18:00 with a long lunch around 12:30 to 14:00, and many banks and small shops close on Sunday and sometimes Monday. The weekend is Saturday and Sunday. |
| Country | France |
From Delhi or Bengaluru, Paris sits 3h30 behind during French summer time and 4h30 behind in winter, so an Indian afternoon between 14:00 and 17:00 lands in the Paris morning. That is the most dependable window for calls with French teams.
New York is six hours behind Paris for most of the year, which leaves only the New York morning (9:00 to 11:00) overlapping with the Paris afternoon. London is always one hour behind, so Paris colleagues often start a call at 10:00 that a London office joins at 9:00. Avoid booking anything with French contacts between 12:30 and 14:00, when lunch is taken seriously.
Paris lies well west within its time zone, so the sun runs late. Around the June solstice the sun sets close to 22:00 and the sky stays light until nearly 23:00, which is why terraces fill so late in summer. In late December sunrise is not until about 8:40, so the morning commute happens in darkness.
France sets its clocks by the same rule as the rest of the EU, so Paris, Madrid, Rome and Berlin always show the same time even though Madrid sits far to the west. If a booking site lists a time as CET in July, read it as CEST; the label is often left unchanged.
No. Paris is one hour ahead of London all year, because both switch to summer time on the same dates.
Clocks went forward on 29 March 2026 and go back one hour on 25 October 2026.
All of mainland France, including Lyon, Marseille and Nice, uses CET/CEST. Overseas regions such as Reunion or Guadeloupe keep their own local zones.
· Written by Om Vaghani, ClockAura