Half-hour and quarter-hour time zones
Most of the world sets its clocks a whole number of hours from UTC. A handful of places chose 30 or 45 minutes instead — usually because a whole hour put noon in the wrong place.
Every fractional offset in use at New Year
| Offset | Where |
|---|---|
| UTC+13:45 | Chatham Islands, New Zealand (summer time) |
| UTC+10:30 | Adelaide and Broken Hill, Australia (summer time; UTC+9:30 in winter) |
| UTC+9:30 | Darwin, Australia |
| UTC+8:45 | Eucla, Western Australia |
| UTC+6:30 | Myanmar; Cocos Islands |
| UTC+5:45 | Nepal |
| UTC+5:30 | India; Sri Lanka |
| UTC+4:30 | Afghanistan |
| UTC+3:30 | Iran |
| UTC−3:30 | Newfoundland, Canada |
| UTC−9:30 | Marquesas Islands |
Why half hours
A zone 15° wide puts the Sun's noon up to half an hour off clock noon at its edges. A country sitting across the middle of two whole-hour strips can either split itself into two zones or take the half-hour in between. India, spanning roughly UTC+5 to UTC+6 by longitude, chose the single national time UTC+5:30. Newfoundland, Iran and Afghanistan made the same kind of choice.
Why quarter hours
Nepal keeps UTC+5:45, fifteen minutes ahead of India. The Chatham Islands sit 45 minutes ahead of the rest of New Zealand. Eucla, on the Western Australia–South Australia border, keeps UTC+8:45, between the two states' times.
China: the opposite choice
China spans almost five geographical zones and keeps one time, UTC+8, nationwide — so in the far west of Xinjiang the Sun can rise after ten in the morning by the clock. Both decisions are political; longitude only sets the starting point.
What it means for the countdown
New Year in India arrives at 18:30 UTC on 31 December, in Nepal at 18:15, in Newfoundland at 03:30 UTC on 1 January. The board takes the zone's actual offset, so the hours and minutes digits are right in every one of these zones; there is no "round to the nearest hour" anywhere in it. See the city-by-city table.
Sources
- Time zone — Wikipedia (India +5:30, Nepal +5:45, offsets −12 to +14)
- Time in China — Wikipedia (five geographical zones, single UTC+8)
- Table produced by evaluating every zone in the IANA time-zone database at New Year via the JavaScript Intl API on 18 September 2026; offsets with a fractional hour were kept