Clockjumper Research
Time Zone Research
Last updated June 2026
When the world can
actually meet
Four studies built from a single dataset: the 9-to-5 workday overlap for every one of 13,861 pairs across 167 cities, computed twice a year so daylight saving is baked in.
Every distributed team eventually hits the same wall: someone is always awake at the wrong time. We wanted to put real numbers on it — not opinions about “follow-the-sun” working, but the actual arithmetic of when two offices can sit down together.
So we took the local 9-to-5 workday for all 167 cities Clockjumper covers and measured, for every one of the 13,861 possible city pairs, how many hours those two workdays overlap on an ordinary day. Then we ran it a second time for July, to see how daylight saving quietly redraws the map twice a year.
Four findings came out of that single dataset. Each is its own study below, and the underlying numbers are free to download and cite.
The four studies
The Remote Work Overlap Report
How many hours the world can actually meet, and the corridors where the answer is zero.
The Most & Least Connected Cities
Where to base a global team, ranked by how much of the world each city can reach inside a normal workday.
How Daylight Saving Breaks Your Calendar
More than a third of city pairs change their overlap between January and July. Who gains, who loses, and who never changes their clocks.
The Meridian Rule
Time-zone overlap is set by east–west distance, not total distance. Every region has a natural delivery partner on its own meridian.
The analysis covers 167 cities and all 13,861 unique pairs between them. For each city we used its local 9:00am–5:00pm workday and its real time-zone rules (including daylight saving) for mid-January and mid-July 2026, then measured the overlapping working hours for every pair. Offsets and transitions come straight from the IANA time-zone database — the same source that drives the Clockjumper converter. A 9-to-5 workday is an assumption, not a law; we note it because it defines every number here.
Every city pair, with January and July overlap in hours.