Central Africa Time (CAT)
Africa/Harare
Thursday, 14 May 2026
About Central Africa Time (CAT)
Central Africa Time (CAT) (Africa/Harare) is currently UTC+02:00.
About the Africa/Harare Time Zone
Reading the IANA Identifier
The full IANA identifier for this time zone is Africa/Harare. IANA names follow a Region/City convention - The part before the slash is a broad geographic area (such as America, Europe, Asia, or Pacific), and the part after the slash is a representative city or location within that area. The city name anchors the zone geographically, but the rules it defines apply to the entire political region that has adopted this offset schedule. Browse the full list of all time zones to see how IANA identifiers are organized across regions.
Current UTC Offset
The current UTC offset for Africa/Harare is +02:00. This means that when it is 12:00 noon UTC, local time here is 12:00 noon plus +02:00. Use the Time Zone Converter to compare this offset against any other zone in real time.
Daylight Saving Status
This time zone is not currently observing Daylight Saving Time. The offset +02:00 is the standard (non-DST) value. If this zone does observe DST, it is currently out of season and the offset will advance by one hour when DST begins.
The Africa/Harare time zone is governed by rules set in the IANA Time Zone Database (also called the tz database or Olson database), which is updated several times per year as countries change their DST rules. Every major operating system, programming language runtime, and cloud platform ships with a copy of this database to ensure accurate local time calculations everywhere in the world. Need to schedule a meeting across this and other zones? The Meeting Planner shows overlapping business hours in a colour-coded grid.
History of This Time Zone
UTC offsets trace their origin to the International Meridian Conference of 1884, held in Washington D.C., where delegates from 25 nations voted to adopt the Greenwich Meridian - The line of 0° longitude passing through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England - As the universal prime meridian. This established Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as the global reference point from which all other local times are measured. In 1960, the more precise Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) replaced GMT as the international standard, defined by atomic clocks rather than the Earth's rotation.
The specific UTC offset used by the Africa/Harare zone reflects a political and practical decision made by the governments or administrations responsible for this region. Most offsets are whole-hour multiples of UTC, chosen to align local noon as closely as possible with solar noon within the zone. Some countries have changed their offset over time - Switching from one side of a timezone boundary to another, adopting or abandoning DST, or even jumping 24 hours to cross the International Date Line for economic or diplomatic reasons. The IANA tz database records all of these historical changes, so software can correctly determine the local time for any moment in the past, present, or future. You can explore how countries and cities relate to their IANA zones throughout our database.
Technical Details
| IANA Name | Africa/Harare |
| Current UTC Offset | +02:00 |
| DST Currently Active | No |
| Abbreviation | CAT |
| Region | Africa |
| Database Source | IANA Time Zone Database (tz / Olson database) |
Countries Using This Time Zone
Cities Using This Time Zone
The following cities in our database use the Africa/Harare time zone. Note that political changes occasionally cause cities to switch zones - We update our database to reflect the latest IANA rules as soon as they are published.