How to convert India time to UTC
- Type the time in India and pick the date in India.
- From is India (IST) and To is UTC. Use the 24-hour clock if you’re filling in a cron job or a config file.
- Read the UTC time. Anything before 5:30 am in India is still the previous day in UTC.
India time to UTC table
The same on every date of the year.
| India (IST) | UTC |
|---|---|
| 12:00 am | 6:30 pm (18:30, previous day) |
| 3:00 am | 9:30 pm (21:30, previous day) |
| 6:00 am | 12:30 am (00:30) |
| 9:00 am | 3:30 am (03:30) |
| 12:00 pm | 6:30 am (06:30) |
| 3:00 pm | 9:30 am (09:30) |
| 6:00 pm | 12:30 pm (12:30) |
| 9:00 pm | 3:30 pm (15:30) |
Why developers convert IST to UTC
Servers, databases, cloud schedulers and CI pipelines usually run on UTC. A backup set for 2 am in India has to be entered as 20:30 the previous day, and a report due at 10 am has to fire at 04:30 UTC. Getting the date wrong is the most common slip, since every Indian time before 5:30 am is still yesterday in UTC.
The half hour also matters. Some tools only accept whole hours for a schedule or a time zone offset, so an Indian time like 9 am lands on 03:30 UTC and can’t be rounded without being 30 minutes off.
Writing the offset
In ISO 8601 India’s offset is written +05:30, so 2026-07-15T15:00+05:30 is 09:30 UTC on the same day. Some systems show it as GMT+5:30 or UTC+05:30. All of these mean the same clock.