October 2023 Saint-Barthélemy — What time is it on St Barts?  That is an easy enough question to answer if you are on on the island...and assuming you have watch.  But what if you are someplace else like the United States or France ?  Then the question of what time is it on St Barts becomes more difficult to answer.

The entire island of St Barts is in the Atlantic Standard time zone which is also known as Coordinated Universal Time minus four hours or abbreviated UTC-4 with Greenwich, England serving as the baseline.

If you are in the United States, for example New York City, then it is relatively simple to understand that St Barts is one hour ahead of the Eastern Standard time zone or UTC-5.  On the other hand, if your are in Fance (e.g., Paris, Marseille, etc.) then your clock would be five hours ahead of St Barts.

But that has all been assuming standard time zones.  To complicate matters, cities further north such as New York and Paris utilize daylight savings time and shift their clocks an hour ahead for additional daylight during the summer months.  St Barts, like most locations closer to the equator, does not need to utilize a daylight savings program because the length of the days does not vary as much as locations further from the equator and closer to the poles (either north or south pole).

Daylight savings in the United States begins earlier and ends later than the similar program in Europe.  For example, this year daylight savings time ends on Sunday, November 5, 2023.  New York City and the US east coast will fall back one hour from the local time on St Barts.  Likewise cities on the west coast of the United States such as Los Angeles will drop back to four hours behind St Barts until the return of daylight saving time in the US on March 10, 2024.

In the mainland of France, daylight savings time will end on Sunday, October 29, 2023 and Paris will be five hours ahead of St Barts all winter until Sunday, March 31, 2024 when daylight savings time returns and France springs to six hours ahead of St Barts.

Having explained all of the that, perhaps the simplest way to find out the time on St Barts might be to check the xavierdavid.fr website which lists the current time in the upper right hand corner across all of its web pages.