City comparison · time difference and converter
Delhi is 2.5 hours behind Beijing right now. Beijing sits in China on Shanghai; Delhi sits in India on Kolkata. They are roughly 3,784 km apart (2,351 mi), a flight of about 5h 27m. Beijing's metro holds around 21.7 million people; Delhi's around 33.8 million.
Slot 1
12:00 / 09:00
Beijing / Delhi
Both inside business hoursSlot 2
13:00 / 10:00
Beijing / Delhi
Both inside business hoursSlot 3
14:00 / 11:00
Beijing / Delhi
Both inside business hoursEach row is one hour in Beijing. Green rows are inside business hours in both cities; amber means only one side is at their desk; grey rows fall outside business hours in both.
Dragon Boat Festival
Beijing, China · 端午节
Fri, Jun 19
Great-circle distance
3,784 km
(2,351 mi)
Approximate flight
5h 27m
850 km/h cruise + 1h taxi/climb/descent
Jet lag
3h
Roughly 1 day to adjust per timezone crossed
The heatmap gives you the shape of the day. If you need to convert one specific hour — say a customer call or a release window — open the converter with both cities already loaded.
Open in converter →The difference between Beijing and Delhi is not really a number, it's a daily rhythm. Delhi is 2.5 hours behind Beijing on the clock today, but the lived version is that Beijing is ahead in the calendar, so by the time Delhi comes online, half of Beijing's day is already gone. That gap, more than the raw offset, is what teams have to design around.
In Beijing, the working day picks up earliest in the financial districts — Beijing's downtown core wakes early and breaks for lunch at the usual hour. The mood in Delhi is its own story: Delhi settles into the evening at the usual hour, with the local commuter pattern setting the pace. If you are scheduling between the two, the heatmap above marks the rows where both patterns line up.
Daylight saving is the other thing to keep an eye on. China either observes DST or holds a fixed offset year-round; India either follows its region's DST pattern or stays put all year. When the two changes are weeks apart, the offset between Beijing and Delhi is one hour off the usual for that stretch — a cliff that catches recurring calendar invites unless your calendar app rebases them automatically. Pin the meeting to a city, not an offset, and the tool handles the rest.
For travellers, the 5h 27m flight is the short version of the story. The longer one is jet lag: roughly one day of adjustment per timezone crossed, which means a trip across the 3-hour gap costs about 3 groggy days on each side. Pilots and cabin crew swear by morning sunlight and an early walk; whatever your routine, the wall-clock numbers above are the source of truth for your first morning in the new city.