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The Remote Work Overlap Report: How Many Hours the World Can Meet
Across 223 major cities and all 24,753 possible pairings, the average two cities share about three hours of the 9-to-5 workday — an average that hides a split personality: nearly a third of all pairs share none of the workday, while roughly one in ten share the entire day.
Last updated July 2026
ClockJumper studies are produced with AI assistance and human review. · research methodology
- The average pair of cities shares 3 hours and 4 minutes of the 9-to-5 workday in January and 3 hours 14 minutes in July.
- 29.5% of pairs have exactly zero overlap — 7,294 of 24,753 pairs share not a single 9-to-5 hour.
- At the other extreme, 9.4% share the full eight-hour workday — 2,334 pairs sit inside the same or neighbouring regime.
- The corridors people assume never sleep — San Francisco ↔ Bangalore, New York ↔ Tokyo, London ↔ Sydney — share zero 9-to-5 hours in both seasons.
A bimodal workday
Every city pair in the dataset bucketed by shared workday minutes on 15 Jan 2026. The distribution is not a bell — it piles at zero and again in the mid range.
In January, the average city pair overlaps for 3 hours and 4 minutes of the standard 9:00–17:00 workday. The distribution is not a gentle bell curve — it's lumpy at both ends. Of the 24,753 pairs, 29.5% have exactly zero overlap, and at the other extreme 9.4% share all eight hours. Between those poles, 13.3% share under two hours, 18.2% share two to four, and 29.6% share four to eight. In July the picture improves slightly — a 3 hour 14 minute average and 28.2% zero-overlap — because northern-hemisphere daylight saving nudges more cities into alignment during the region's summer.
The striking part is which pairs fall into the zero column. They include the corridors people assume never sleep. San Francisco and Bangalore — the archetypal software axis — share zero 9-to-5 hours in both January and July. So do New York and Tokyo, and London and Sydney. These aren't teams that meet across a stretched morning; they're teams that hand work off at the edges of the day and never sit at the desk together. “Follow the sun” is not a figure of speech — it's the only option those corridors have.
Where overlap is easy, it tends to be complete. London and New York share a clean three hours (180 minutes) year-round; Dubai and Singapore hold a steady four (240 minutes); Los Angeles and São Paulo manage three to four despite spanning a continent and an equator, because they sit close on the same north–south meridian. The lesson underneath the average: two cities usually either meet comfortably or barely meet at all, and which side they land on is set almost entirely by how far apart they sit east-to-west.
The corridors everyone actually works across
The averages matter less than the specific lanes that real companies run on. Here's what the 9-to-5 overlap looks like on the routes that come up again and again:
| Corridor | January | July |
|---|---|---|
| New York ↔ London | 3h 00 | 3h 00 |
| New York ↔ Mumbai | 0h | 0h |
| San Francisco ↔ London | 0h | 0h |
| San Francisco ↔ Bangalore | 0h | 0h |
| London ↔ Mumbai | 2h 30 | 3h 30 |
| Berlin ↔ Bangalore | 3h 30 | 4h 30 |
| London ↔ Singapore | 0h | 1h 00 |
| New York ↔ Tokyo | 0h | 0h |
| Los Angeles ↔ Sydney | 3h 00 | 1h 00 |
| Los Angeles ↔ São Paulo | 3h 00 | 4h 00 |
| New York ↔ Los Angeles | 5h 00 | 5h 00 |
| Dubai ↔ Singapore | 4h 00 | 4h 00 |
A note on counting
Give each of the world's 42 distinct timezone regimes one equal vote — rather than letting each city count once — and the average overlap falls to 2 hours 34 minutes, with 37% of regime-pairs at zero. The city view is rosier because the world's major cities cluster into a handful of mutually close time regimes (Europe alone contributes dozens of cities to a few adjacent bands), while the regime view gives equal weight to remote, isolated clocks. Both framings tell the same story; they simply answer different questions — what does the average major-city pair look like versus what do the average clock regimes look like. Full methodology and both figures are on the methodology page.
Figures: city-weighted, 24,753 pairs, January and July 2026.
Want the exact figure for your own pair of cities? Look up any two on the Clockjumper meeting planner, or download the full dataset to sort all 24,753 pairs yourself.
- What counts as "overlap"?
- The number of hours both cities are simultaneously inside a 9:00am–5:00pm local workday on an ordinary day.
- Why is the US–India overlap zero?
- India is 10.5 hours ahead of US Eastern time. When it’s 9am in New York, it’s 7:30pm in Mumbai — the Indian workday is already over, so no 9-to-5 hour is shared.
- Does a 9-to-6 workday change the conclusions?
- It lifts every number slightly and rescues a few near-miss pairs, but the zero-overlap corridors stay at zero — an extra hour can’t close a ten-hour gap.
Explore the live data
The numbers on this page are a static snapshot. Use the live tools below to check the current offset, overlap, and daylight-saving status for any city or pair.