IST: India / Irish / Israel Standard Time
India Standard Time
Sunday, 27th September 2026
What IST actually is
UTC+5:30: one zone for all of India, and a half-hour offset that trips up every meeting scheduler.
IST means 3 different things
This is the whole reason calendar software uses IANA identifiers instead of abbreviations. All of them, live:
India Standard Time
UTC+5:30: one zone for all of India, and a half-hour offset that trips up every meeting scheduler.
Clocks here do not change: this zone stays on the same offset all year.
Irish Standard Time
UTC+1 in summer. Ireland is the one country whose *summer* time is legally the standard time and whose winter time is the deviation.
Clocks go back 1 hour on Sunday, 25th October 2026, at 1:59 am local time (1:00 am after the change).
Convert IST
Looking for UTC and GMT developer tooling (epoch conversion, ISO 8601, a free time API)? That lives on our sibling site utctime.app.
Other abbreviations
Questions people ask
What time is it in IST right now?
2:52 pm (14:52) on Sunday, 27th September 2026, for India Standard Time. Careful: IST means 3 different things. The other meanings and their current times are listed below.
What does IST stand for?
India / Irish / Israel Standard Time. UTC+5:30: one zone for all of India, and a half-hour offset that trips up every meeting scheduler.
What is the UTC offset of IST?
India Standard Time: UTC+5:30; Irish Standard Time: UTC+1; Israel Standard Time: UTC+3.
Why does IST mean more than one time zone?
Time-zone abbreviations were never standardised: several countries independently picked the same letters. IST is one of the worst offenders, with 3 meanings in current use. This is why calendar software and databases use IANA identifiers like Asia/Kolkata instead: they are unique, and they carry the daylight-saving rules with them.