City comparison · time difference and converter
San Francisco is 8 hours behind London right now. London sits in United Kingdom on London; San Francisco sits in United States on Los Angeles. They are roughly 8,616 km apart (5,354 mi), a flight of about 11h 08m. London's metro holds around 9.5 million people; San Francisco's around 4.7 million.
Slot 1
00:00 / 16:00
London / San Francisco
Partial overlapSlot 2
09:00 / 01:00
London / San Francisco
Partial overlapSlot 3
10:00 / 02:00
London / San Francisco
Partial overlapEach row is one hour in London. 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.
Juneteenth
San Francisco, United States
Fri, Jun 19
Great-circle distance
8,616 km
(5,354 mi)
Approximate flight
11h 08m
850 km/h cruise + 1h taxi/climb/descent
Jet lag
8h
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 London and San Francisco is not really a number, it's a daily rhythm. San Francisco is 8 hours behind London on the clock today, but the lived version is that London is ahead in the calendar, so by the time San Francisco comes online, half of London's day is already gone. That gap, more than the raw offset, is what teams have to design around.
In London, the working day picks up earliest in the financial districts — City of London desks switch on by 07:30 for the European open. The mood in San Francisco is its own story: SoMa and FiDi quiet around 18:00, with Mission bars taking the after-work crowd. 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. United Kingdom shifts the clock on the last Sunday of March and October; United States shifts on the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday of November. When the two changes are weeks apart, the offset between London and San Francisco 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 11h 08m 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 8-hour gap costs about 8 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.