What is CEST time? European time zones explained

Time zones getting you in a spin? Here’s what CEST is… (Picture: Getty)

There are plenty of sayings about time – time waits for no one. Time is money. Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.

We all know to make the most of our time – be it efficiently with work and chores, or maximising our self-care time when we go on our summer holidays and other travels.

But that’s where time can trip us up. Not everyone’s on the same time zone.

What are the different time zones around Europe? Handy to know if you’re working from anywhere…

What is CEST time?

Whether you’re going on your travels or trying to organise an overseas FaceTime call with a friend abroad, you’ve likely come across the acronym CEST shown after a time.

This can be, for example, the kick-off of a football match or the start-time of a TV show.

Plenty of popular holiday destinations – including Italy – are on CEST (Picture: Getty)

CEST time stands for Central European Summer Time. It is the summer time of Central European Time (CET).

CEST is one hour ahead of us during British Summer Time (BST) and two hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) – although as most European countries also put their clocks forward at the end of March (ushering in CEST) and back at the end of October (bringing in CET), the difference is altered to one hour.

The only European countries which don’t are Russia, Iceland, Belarus and Turkey.

Countries which use CEST include:

• Antarctica
• Austria
• Belgium
• Denmark
• France
• Germany
• Italy
• Malta
• Monaco
• Sweden
• Switzerland

Most of Europe uses three standard time zones.

The different time zones can get confusing (Picture: Getty Images)

From west to east the time zones are Western European Time (WET) which is the same as GMT, Central European Time (CET) which is one hour ahead of GMT and Eastern European Time (EET) which is two hours ahead of GMT.

Countries on WET time include the UK and Ireland, as well as Portugal, the Canary Islands and the Faroe Islands, while countries which use EET (known as EEST in the summer) include Bulgaria, Cyprus, Finland, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Romania and Ukraine.

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