Réponse

Daylight Saving and Online Class Times

Pakistan never changes its clocks, so every clock change lands on your side. Which four of our fourteen markets move, when, and the weeks the UK and US differ.

Réponse courte

How does daylight saving affect online class times?

Pakistan does not change its clocks, so every clock change happens on the student's side. Twice a year your lesson moves an hour — either in your local time or in ours.

La réponse en bref
Pakistan has kept a fixed UTC+5 with no daylight saving for years, so every clock change happens on your side, not ours. Four of the fourteen countries we teach into change their clocks — the UK, the United States, Canada and part of Australia — and each on a different date.

Ce qui change la réponse

If you are in the Gulf, Malaysia, Singapore or South Africa none of this applies: the offset to Pakistan is identical every week of the year.
If you are in Australia the clocks move in the opposite direction to the northern hemisphere, and only in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT.
If you are in Arizona, Hawaii, Saskatchewan or the Yukon you sit inside a country that changes while you do not.
If your lesson already sits at the edge of our teaching window, a one-hour drift pushes it outside altogether and it has to be re-slotted rather than absorbed.

Four of fourteen

Most of the map does not move at all. Pakistan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Malaysia, Singapore and South Africa keep the same offset all year, which means ten of our fourteen markets have a fixed relationship with our timetable and never need a second thought.

The four that move each do it on their own dates, under their own rules:

United Kingdom — forward one hour at 01:00 on the last Sunday in March, back at 02:00 on the last Sunday in October. In 2026: 29 March and 25 October.
United States — forward at 02:00 on the second Sunday in March, back on the first Sunday in November. In 2026: 8 March and 1 November. Arizona (outside the Navajo Nation), Hawaii and the US territories do not change.
Canada — the same dates as the United States, except Saskatchewan, which stays on Central Standard Time all year, and the Yukon, which stays on UTC−7.
Australia — forward on the first Sunday in October, back on the first Sunday in April, in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT only. Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory never change.

The arithmetic, using the UK

Pakistan is UTC+5. Britain is UTC+0 in winter and UTC+1 in summer, so Pakistan is five hours ahead of the UK from late October to late March and four hours ahead from late March to late October.

A 17:00 lesson in Birmingham is therefore 22:00 in Lahore in January and 21:00 in Lahore in July. Same clock time for the family, different working hour for the tutor. Turn it round and it is the same fact seen from the other side: hold the Pakistani slot fixed and the British family's lesson slides from 17:00 to 18:00 and back again.

This produces one concrete consequence worth knowing before you book. Our weekday window ends at 22:00 PKT. In British winter that is 17:00 in the UK; in British summer it is 18:00. So a UK family can hold an 18:00 slot from late March to late October and cannot hold it in the winter. If evenings are the only time that works, book a 17:00 slot and it will survive both halves of the year.

The weeks when the UK and the US disagree

The UK and the US do not change on the same day, and the gap is not symmetrical. In spring the US goes first — 8 March against 29 March in 2026 — so for three weeks the usual five-hour Atlantic gap is four. In autumn the UK goes first, 25 October against 1 November, so the mismatch lasts about a week.

For a single student this is invisible: Pakistan holds still and each country moves relative to it independently. It becomes visible the moment a class spans both, which happens more than you would expect — cousins studying together, siblings split across a move, a sibling group where one is at university abroad. Those four weeks a year are when a shared class quietly drifts an hour apart.

Australia adds a second, stranger overlap. Australian eastern-state clocks go back on the first Sunday in April, just after Britain's go forward, so the London–Sydney gap runs through eleven hours, then ten, then nine across the year. If you coordinate anything between those two cities, put the time zone in the calendar entry rather than a plain number.

What we do about it, and what you can do

Because Pakistan never moves, there are only two possible policies and no third: hold the student's local time and shift the tutor's hour, or hold the tutor's hour and shift the student's local time. We hold the student's local time, because a lesson slotted between school and dinner has to stay between school and dinner, and we confirm the change in the week before a changeover.

The exception is the lesson at the very edge of the day, described above. When a slot falls outside 14:00–22:00 PKT after a clock change, it genuinely cannot be held and has to move — we would rather tell you which week that is when you book than surprise you in October.

Three habits remove most of the remaining trouble.

Put the lesson in a calendar with a time zone attached, not as a plain time. The calendar then does the conversion for you, twice a year, silently.
Never agree a time in "GMT" during the British summer. The UK is on BST from late March to late October, and this single confusion causes more missed first lessons than anything else.
If you are counting weeks back from an exam date, count in the student's local calendar, not the tutor's.

Questions fréquentes

Does Pakistan use daylight saving time?

No. Pakistan stays on UTC+5 all year. It has experimented with clock changes in the past and does not do so now, which is genuinely convenient for an internationally scheduled class: there is one fixed reference point that never argues with itself, and every conversion is done against it.

Will my class time change when the clocks go back?

Your local time stays the same and the Pakistani time shifts by an hour, unless your slot is at the edge of our window, in which case it has to move. We contact affected families in the week before the change rather than after it, because a lesson missed on a changeover Sunday is a lesson nobody enjoys explaining.

Do the Gulf countries change their clocks?

No. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait and Bahrain all keep a fixed offset year-round, as do Malaysia, Singapore and South Africa. For families in those countries the gap to Pakistan is the same in January as in July, and a booked slot stays put permanently.

Why do Australian clocks move the other way?

Because the seasons are the other way round. The southern hemisphere's long summer evenings fall in December and January, so daylight saving there runs from October to April. It is also only partial: Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory do not observe it at all, so Australia holds three different offsets to Pakistan for half the year.

What is the simplest way to avoid confusion?

Agree the slot once in the student's local time, put it in a calendar with the time zone attached, and never restate it as a UTC or Pakistani figure in a message. Every conversion done by hand in a chat window is a chance to get it wrong; a calendar entry with a zone attached converts itself for ever.

Sources

When do the clocks change? — GOV.UK
Daylight Saving Time (DST) — National Institute of Standards and Technology

Dernière mise à jour 21 août 2026