Office hours by country
What time it is for your recipient, and when every office is staffed at once.
Updated on:
Toronto trails Rome, Madrid, Berlin, Paris and Brussels by six hours for most of the year, and Lisbon by five. Three hours separate Vancouver from Toronto. This live board displays the time in the seven countries CaptainFax serves, marks each one open or closed (weekdays 9 am to 5 pm, as a rough guide) and works out the window all of them share today.
Live board
| Country | Local time | Offices | Window in your time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Belgium | — | — | — |
| Canada | — | — | — |
| France | — | — | — |
| Germany | — | — | — |
| Italy | — | — | — |
| Portugal | — | — | — |
| Spain | — | — | — |
Best common window today
Calculating…
Hours are indicative: 9 am to 5 pm on weekdays. Public holidays are ignored. Daylight-saving changes are handled automatically.
Canada covers six time zones
The board takes Toronto as its Canadian reference. Elsewhere in Canada the difference with Brussels spans from 9 hours in British Columbia down to 4.5 hours in Newfoundland.
- Pacific: Vancouver—
- Mountain: Edmonton—
- Central: Winnipeg—
- Eastern: Toronto, Ottawa—
- Atlantic: Halifax—
- Newfoundland: St. John’s—
Timing a fax across time zones
Sending takes one or two minutes at any hour. What matters is what follows: a page printed in an empty office on a Friday night may lie in a tray under other paper until Monday. Sending during the recipient’s working day makes same-day pickup more likely.
Even within Canada the gaps are real. Between a Halifax clinic and a Vancouver pharmacy there are four hours, and St. John’s sits half an hour further ahead still. Between Ontario and Europe the overlap is brief: by the time Toronto offices open, much of the European afternoon has passed. Daylight saving complicates matters, because the two continents switch their clocks on different dates, so for a few weeks every year the gap shrinks by one hour.
The board draws on the IANA time-zone data that ships with your browser and stays current there; every day it recalculates the period when all seven countries fall within 9 am to 5 pm. Real opening hours differ by organisation. Government counters, court registries and pharmacies post their own opening times, which are worth checking when a fax cannot wait.
Time zone questions
- Is it possible to send a fax while offices are closed?
- Yes. CaptainFax transmits at any hour, and the destination machine accepts the pages with nobody beside it. Office hours only suggest when a person is likely to read it.
- How long is the common window between Canada and Europe?
- Taking offices open 9 am to 5 pm, the overlap is roughly two hours, namely 9 to 11 am in Toronto against 3 to 5 pm in Brussels. Further west there is none, since Belgium is already at 6 pm when Vancouver reaches 9 am.
- Does the board know about public holidays?
- No. They vary between countries and even between regions or provinces. The board only separates weekdays from weekends, so verify with the local calendar ahead of an important send.
Keep exploring
A few pages that go well with the one you just read.
- Choose a country to see its dial code and the number format we expect, then send your fax to a landline.
- Choose the country, type the number, and find out at once whether it is ready to use.
- Look up a country’s code, its usual prefixes and how long its numbers are before you fax across a border.
- Brief, straightforward answers to what people wonder before they send a fax, while it goes out, and once it is done.
Latest guides
Recent blog articles on this subject.