Current time in Chennai, India
The current local time in Chennai is shown below. Chennai observes IST.
What's the daylight saving status?
Chennai does not observe daylight saving time. The local offset is fixed year-round.
When are sunrise & sunset today?
What are the timezone facts?
- Timezone
- Asia/Calcutta
- Standard abbreviation
- IST
- Observes daylight saving
- No
- Country
- 🇮🇳 India
- Business hours
- 09:00 – 17:00 local
What's the timezone history of Chennai?
Chennai shares Indian Standard Time with the rest of India, but its eastern position at around 80.3 degrees east places it ahead of the IST meridian: solar noon arrives at the city around 12:11, slightly before the clock reading. This is the largest east-of-meridian Indian city after Kolkata, producing earlier effective daylight hours than Mumbai or Bengaluru. The single national offset works smoothly for coordination with Mumbai or Delhi but produces a 30-minute jump at the Sri Lankan border to the south.
What are the working hours in Chennai?
Chennai's working economy combines the automotive industry (the city is sometimes called India's Detroit, with Hyundai, Ford, Renault-Nissan, and BMW manufacturing operations), an IT services sector concentrated in OMR (the Old Mahabalipuram Road tech corridor), and the country's largest film industry by output (Kollywood). Office hours run 09:00 to 18:00 with a one-hour lunch typically taken at workplace canteens. Pongal, the four-day Tamil harvest festival in mid-January, is the city's most distinctive public holiday and produces effective shutdowns of the local commercial economy.
Where is Chennai?
Chennai sits on the Coromandel Coast of south-eastern India along the Bay of Bengal, the capital of Tamil Nadu and the fourth-largest city in the country. The municipal population is around 7 million, with the wider metropolitan area reaching above 11 million. The flat coastal plain extends inland for around 30 kilometres before rising gradually toward the Eastern Ghats. The Cooum and Adyar rivers cross the city east to west, both heavily polluted but central to the city's drainage during the November monsoon.