UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) is the time standard the whole world uses as a reference. The clock above shows the current UTC time. Brasília is on UTC-3, that is, 3 hours behind.
UTC and local time in major cities
| City | Time now | Offset now |
|---|---|---|
| São Paulo (Brasília) | 20:34:03 | UTC-3 |
| Manaus | 19:34:03 | UTC-4 |
| Rio Branco | 18:34:03 | UTC-5 |
| Fernando de Noronha | 21:34:03 | UTC-2 |
| New York | 19:34:03 | UTC-4 |
| Los Angeles | 16:34:03 | UTC-7 |
| London | 00:34:03 | UTC+1 |
| Paris | 01:34:03 | UTC+2 |
| Moscow | 02:34:03 | UTC+3 |
| Dubai | 03:34:03 | UTC+4 |
| Mumbai | 05:04:03 | UTC+5:30 |
| Beijing | 07:34:03 | UTC+8 |
| Tokyo | 08:34:03 | UTC+9 |
| Sydney | 09:34:03 | UTC+10 |
What UTC is and why it exists
UTC is the basis of civil time. It is built from International Atomic Time, a weighted average of hundreds of atomic clocks, and kept in step with the Earth's rotation by occasional leap seconds. Every time zone is expressed as an offset from it: UTC-3 for Brasília, UTC+1 for Paris in winter, UTC+9 for Tokyo. UTC itself never observes daylight saving time; only the offsets of individual countries change.
How to convert UTC to Brasília time
Subtract 3 hours. When the result goes below 00:00, add 24 hours and move to the previous day. For the reverse, add 3 hours. Brazil has used UTC-3 in the whole Brasília zone since daylight saving time was abolished in 2019, so the rule is the same all year.
| UTC | Brasília |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | 21:00 (previous day) |
| 03:00 | 00:00 |
| 06:00 | 03:00 |
| 09:00 | 06:00 |
| 12:00 | 09:00 |
| 15:00 | 12:00 |
| 18:00 | 15:00 |
| 21:00 | 18:00 |
What UTC-3 means
The "-3" says the local clock is three hours behind UTC. So when it is 15:00 UTC it is 12:00 in Brasília, and when it is midnight UTC it is 21:00 the previous evening. The same notation appears in e-mail headers and calendar invitations, for example "-0300".
UTC in computing, aviation and ISO 8601
Servers, databases and APIs store timestamps in UTC so they mean the same thing everywhere; conversion to local time is done only for display. The ISO 8601 format writes a UTC instant like 2026-10-01T15:00:00Z, where the "Z" (Zulu) means offset zero, while Brasília local time is written 2026-10-01T12:00:00-03:00: the same instant. Aviation and meteorology use UTC ("Zulu time") for flight plans, forecasts and NOTAMs, so crews and controllers in different countries never have to translate local clocks.
Leap seconds
Because the Earth's spin is slightly irregular, UTC has occasionally been adjusted with an extra second (23:59:60). Twenty-seven have been added since 1972, the last on December 31, 2016. They have caused outages in software that assumed every minute has 60 seconds, so the international metrology community decided in 2022 to stop adding them by 2035.
Need the time in another city? Try the time zone converter, compare cities on world time, or read about the related GMT standard.