IST to PST Converter

Twelve and a half hours, or thirteen and a half

India Standard Time is UTC+5:30 permanently. Los Angeles runs at UTC-8 in winter and UTC-7 in summer, which puts the two cities 13.5 hours apart during Pacific Standard Time and 12.5 hours apart during Pacific Daylight Time. This is close to the maximum useful separation between two populated places: half a day.

Because the gap is near twelve hours, a convenient shortcut is that Pacific time is roughly India's time twelve hours earlier, with a half hour and an hour of daylight saving to adjust. Convenient, but wrong often enough to miss calls, which is why the table above derives the figure for the specific date rather than approximating.

Two nine-to-five days that never touch

Take a 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM day in Bengaluru. In Los Angeles that runs from about 7:30 PM the previous evening to 4:30 AM. Take a 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM day in Los Angeles and in Bengaluru it runs from 9:30 PM to 6:30 AM the next morning. Under standard hours, there is no overlap in either direction.

Every India-Pacific call therefore costs somebody time outside their working day. The two least painful options are an early morning in California against the Indian evening, or a late Indian evening against the Californian morning. Around 8:30 AM Pacific lands at roughly 9:00 PM in India; around 7:00 AM Pacific lands at roughly 7:30 PM in India, which most teams find the more tolerable of the two.

• 9:00 AM in Los Angeles is 9:30 PM or 10:30 PM in Bengaluru, depending on the season.
• 9:00 AM in Bengaluru is 7:30 PM or 8:30 PM the previous day in Los Angeles.
• There is no time at which both cities are inside a conventional nine-to-six day.

Working with a team that has no overlap

When the geometry rules out a comfortable daily call, the usual answer is to stop trying to have one. Teams split across India and the US west coast tend to settle on a written handover at each end of the day and a single synchronous call each week, scheduled early in California and in the Indian evening, with the inconvenience rotated between the two sides.

If you do need a recurring call, put it on a fixed local time at one end and accept that it drifts by an hour at the other twice a year. Fixing it in UTC instead keeps the gap constant but moves the meeting for both sides, which is usually worse.

PST, PDT and what people usually mean

PST is Pacific Standard Time, UTC-8, in force from early November to mid-March. PDT is Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-7, for the rest of the year. Since the daylight saving period is now the longer of the two, a message written in June that says "PST" almost certainly means PDT.

This converter treats the request as Los Angeles time and applies whichever rule is correct on the date you select, which sidesteps the ambiguity. When you write an invite yourself, "Pacific time" or an explicit UTC offset avoids the problem entirely.