by Tony Dunnell ; May, 2026
Most people logically assume the maximum time difference between any two places on Earth would be 24 hours. After all, that’s how long it takes our planet to spin once, so it seems sensible that no two points on Earth could be more than one full rotation apart. Systems crafted by humans, however, are often anything but sensible — and the actual maximum time difference on Earth is 26 hours. So where do those extra two hours come from?
The conventional time zone system runs from UTC-12 in the west to UTC+12 in the east (UTC meaning “Coordinated Universal Time”), which would produce a maximum gap of 24 hours. Within that system there are 38 offsets, which is the amount of time a specific region’s local clock is ahead of or behind UTC. UTC-12, for example, refers to a time zone that’s 12 hours behind UTC, while UTC+12 would be 12 hours ahead.
Those offsets normally remain within the 24-hour frame, but there are places on Earth that have gone against that convention, winding up in UTC+13 (which is used in a handful of island nations in the Pacific Ocean and some research bases in Antarctica) and even UTC+14. Three placesare responsible for the strange occurrence of the latter time zone:
Howland Island and Baker Island are uninhabited coral atolls (and unincorporated U.S. territories) sitting at UTC-12, at what is considered the far west of our planet. Kiribati, meanwhile, sits in the extreme east — and is home to the peculiar time zone of UTC+14.
Despite being more than an entire day apart on the calendar, those islands are only a few hundred miles away from each other in the Pacific Ocean, thanks to the spherical nature of the planet and the way we draw our lines of longitude. So, while it’s 10:30 p.m. on a Wednesday on Howland Island and Baker Island, it can be 12:30 a.m. on a Friday in the Line Islands.
While this may seem odd, there’s a logical reason why Kiribati ended up at UTC+14. The islands were once located right on the international date line, meaning a full 24-hour gap existed within the same territory, so while it was Monday in the western islands, it was Sunday in the east.
To eliminate that confusion, Kiribati made the decision to essentially move the international date line at the very end of 1994, placing all its territories on the same date. The result was UTC+14, a time zone that shouldn’t technically exist, and a 26-hour gap between Kiribati and its Pacific neighbors.
