Australia — Time & Holidays

Time and holidays in Australia

Australia is a continent as much as a country, and it keeps several clocks. Western Australia runs at UTC+8, the central states at UTC+9:30, and the eastern states at UTC+10, with the southern and eastern parts of the country moving an hour ahead for daylight saving over the southern summer, roughly October to April. Crucially, because Australia sits in the southern hemisphere, its seasons are flipped relative to Europe and North America: Christmas falls in high summer, and daylight saving runs through what northern countries think of as winter. The live clock on this page shows Sydney time on the east coast.

From Australia Day to Anzac Day

The civic calendar opens with New Year's Day and Australia Day on the twenty-sixth of January, which marks the 1788 arrival of the First Fleet and is a focus of both celebration and reflection. Anzac Day on the twenty-fifth of April is among the most solemn and widely observed, honouring those who served and died in war, beginning with the Gallipoli campaign, and marked by dawn services across the nation. The Easter weekend and the King's Birthday holiday, observed on the second Monday of June in most states, round out the shared national days, though individual states and territories add their own. Because the country spans multiple zones and only part of it shifts for daylight saving, the difference with the rest of the world changes through the year, which the live clock and time-zone converter handle automatically.