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The Remote Work Overlap Report
We measured how many hours of the working day every major city shares with every other. Across 13,861 pairs, the answer is smaller than most teams assume.
Last updated June 2026
- The average pair of cities shares just 2 hours and 57 minutes of the 9-to-5 workday.
- One in three city pairs (33.4%) has zero overlap — no hour of the normal workday is shared at all.
- Only 6.3% of pairs enjoy a full eight-hour overlap, and almost all of those sit in the same or neighbouring time zones.
- The US East Coast and India share zero working hours. The US West Coast and both London and India also share zero.
The workday the world actually shares
Every corridor below is measured from the same dataset — January and July, side by side, so daylight saving is visible instead of hidden.
Remote-work advice loves the phrase “a few hours of overlap.” We wanted to know whether that few-hour cushion actually exists, so we calculated it for every pairing in our set of 167 cities.
The headline number is sobering. The median city pair overlaps for just two hours a day, and the average sits at two hours and fifty-seven minutes — barely enough for a single shared meeting block once you account for lunch and focus time at both ends. The distribution is even starker than the average suggests: 4,636 pairs, or one in three, never overlap at all. For those teams, “let's find a time that works for everyone” has no honest answer inside normal hours.
At the other extreme, only 879 pairs (6.3%) share the full working day, and they are almost entirely cities in the same or adjacent zones — Chicago and Dallas, Paris and Berlin. Genuine all-day overlap across a long distance essentially doesn't happen.
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 ↔ India | 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 |
| New York ↔ Los Angeles | 5h 00 | 5h 00 |
Three things jump out.
First, the US–India lane is effectively closed. Whether you measure from New York or San Francisco, to Mumbai or Bangalore, the shared 9-to-5 window is zero — the 10.5-hour gap to India Standard Time pushes one team's workday entirely into the other's night. The companies that run this corridor successfully don't find overlap; they manufacture it, with one side taking early calls and the other staying late.
Second, London is the great connector and San Francisco is the great isolate. London shares three hours with New York and reaches India for two to three hours a day. San Francisco, three time zones further west, shares nothing with either London or India inside normal hours. The US West Coast's distance from Europe and Asia is the single biggest scheduling tax in tech.
Third, the transatlantic lane is the quiet exception. New York ↔ London holds a steady three hours year-round because both cities shift their clocks by roughly the same amount in the same months — one of the few long-haul corridors daylight saving leaves alone.
What this means
If your team spans more than about five hours, you are not running a synchronous company whether you admit it or not. The data says the realistic options are narrow: cluster your team within a workable band, accept a permanent “golden hour” or two and build everything else around asynchronous handoffs, or rotate the burden of awkward-hour meetings so it doesn't always fall on the same region. The one option the numbers rule out is pretending a comfortable overlap exists when, for a third of the world's city pairs, it doesn't.
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 13,861 pairs yourself.
FAQ
- 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.