Time Zone Overlap for Remote Teams: A Worked Table of City Pairs

Teams argue about time zone overlap without agreeing what they are counting. One person means the hours when a call is technically possible. Another means the hours when both people are at their desks and available. The difference between those two numbers is where most distributed scheduling pain lives.

"We have four hours of overlap." They have four hours in which at least one side is either eating lunch or finishing their day.

How to count overlap honestly

Use one rule and apply it to both sides: overlap is the hours between 09:00 and 17:00 in both places at once, minus lunch. Not "before nine if we start early". Not "they can stay until seven".

The reason to be strict is that the generous count always produces a plan that depends on one side being flexible every single day. That works for a quarter and then that person leaves.

The table of city pairs

Overlap on a standard 09:00 to 17:00 working day, during the northern hemisphere autumn. Clock changes shift several of these by an hour, which is covered further down.

Pair	Gap	Overlap	The shared window
London and Amsterdam	1 hour	7 hours	Nearly the whole day
Amsterdam and New York	6 hours	2 hours	15:00 to 17:00 Amsterdam
London and New York	5 hours	3 hours	14:00 to 17:00 London
New York and San Francisco	3 hours	5 hours	12:00 to 17:00 New York
Amsterdam and Bengaluru	3.5 hours	4.5 hours	09:00 to 13:30 Amsterdam
London and Singapore	7 hours	1 hour	09:00 to 10:00 London
Amsterdam and Tokyo	7 hours	1 hour	09:00 to 10:00 Amsterdam
New York and Bengaluru	9.5 hours	Zero	No shared desk hours
San Francisco and Berlin	9 hours	Zero	No shared desk hours
Sydney and London	10 hours	Zero	No shared desk hours

Two things stand out. Amsterdam and New York, one of the most common transatlantic pairings in European software companies, has two hours. And several pairings that companies run every day have none at all, which means every meeting on those pairs is somebody's evening or somebody's breakfast. You can run your own numbers with the time zone overlap calculator.

What to do when overlap is under two hours

Below two hours, scheduling stops being the lever. There is no clever calendar arrangement that turns one shared hour into a working rhythm, because that hour is also when people arrive, catch up and drink coffee.

The question becomes which work is allowed to need live time. In practice three things do: decisions with genuine disagreement, difficult conversations with a person, and the first week of a new relationship. Everything else is a written artifact that someone has put a meeting costume on.

• Move status out of live time entirely. It is the largest consumer of overlap and the one that least needs it. See replacing the status meeting.
• Give each seam one decision slot per week, agenda of decisions only, cancelled without ceremony when there are none.
• Write a handoff at the end of each day with four fields: current state, open questions, blockers, next actions. Format in the end of day handoff.

Spend the overlap you have on the right things

Teams with two hours of overlap often spend ninety minutes of it on a call where people read updates aloud, then wonder why nothing gets decided. Audit what your overlap currently buys before you try to buy more of it. The sizing argument is in how much overlap a distributed team actually needs.

There is also a category of question that does not need overlap and does not need a document. Someone in New York needs to know where a colleague in Amsterdam left a piece of work, and the Amsterdam colleague is asleep. This is what StandIn is built for. At the end of their day the Amsterdam person spends about ninety seconds on a brief: what moved, what is open, what is blocked, what is next, mostly drafted from the work itself. Overnight, their StandIn answers from that brief, in their words, with a source under every answer. It never guesses, and when the answer is not there it says so and names who to ask. The two hours of overlap can then be spent on the two things that genuinely need both people. See working across time zones.

The clock change trap

Europe, North America and Australia change clocks on different dates, and India, Singapore and Japan do not change at all. For a few weeks each spring and autumn your real overlap shifts by an hour without anyone editing a calendar.

The practical consequence is that a recurring meeting pinned to a European time silently moves for everyone else. Pin recurring cross zone meetings to the time zone of the people for whom the slot is worst, and they will notice the change rather than absorb it silently.

Common Questions

Is four hours of overlap the right target when hiring?

It is a common requirement and it quietly rules out large parts of the world. Ask instead what you actually need live time for. If the honest answer is a daily status call, fix that first and widen the hiring pool afterwards.

Should we mandate core hours?

Core hours help when they are short and genuinely shared. They hurt when they are set by the largest office and everyone else adjusts, which is the same cost transfer described above with a policy attached. See working hours agreements.

What about a team split across three zones?

Pairwise overlap still exists but there is usually no hour shared by all three, which changes the design problem entirely. That case is covered in managing a team across three time zones.

How do we handle zero overlap pairs?

Accept that every live conversation costs someone their evening, and therefore ration them. One scheduled call per fortnight, rotated so the same office does not always pay, and everything else in writing with a clean daily handoff.