Best Meeting Times for US Remote Teams: A PST/ET Overlap Guide
If your team is split between Pacific Time and Eastern Time — or you're hiring contractors in Europe and India on top of that — meeting scheduling stops being math and starts feeling like geometry. Here's the practical overlap map most distributed engineering teams converge on.
The Quick-Glance Overlap Map (Anchored to 9am-5pm PT)
| Other zone | Workday in PT terms | Useful overlap with US-West |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| US-East (ET) | 6am-2pm PT | 5 hours (9am-2pm PT) |
| GMT / London (BST) | 1am-9am PT | ~30 min realistic |
| CET / Berlin | 12am-8am PT | None during PT business hours |
| IST / Bengaluru | 8:30pm-4:30am PT | None — flip a side |
| JST / Tokyo | 5pm-1am PT | ~1 hour (5-6pm PT) |
| AEST / Sydney | 4pm-12am PT | ~1 hour (4-5pm PT) |
The single most important number on this table: PT and ET share a clean 5-hour overlap, 9am-2pm PT (12pm-5pm ET). That's where your all-hands belongs.
The 3 Overlap Windows That Actually Work
1. The "Coast-to-Coast" window — 11am ET / 8am PT
Standups at 11am ET caught everyone — early risers on the West Coast, mid-morning on the East. This is the cleanest standup time for a US-only team. It survives DST shifts and doesn't push anyone into bad hours.
2. The "Atlantic" window — 9am ET / 2pm GMT / 3pm CET
For US-East ↔ Europe overlap, the best you'll get with a 9-5 European workday is the morning slot in ET. Schedule design reviews and cross-team syncs here. West Coast colleagues can opt in if it matters.
3. The "Eastern Bridge" — 9pm IST / 11:30am ET
For India ↔ US-East collaboration, this is the only sane window — late evening for India, late morning for the East Coast. If your team has both PT and IST, you have a structural problem that no calendar can fix.
Try the tool mentioned above?
Open the related KuchhBhi tool and put the guide into practice.
Putting the all-hands at 9am PT. That's noon ET — fine for the East Coast, but the West Coast hasn't had coffee. Move it to 10am or 11am PT and team energy doubles.
Letting Europe attendees sit through 6am or 7am calls every week. This burns out your London and Berlin engineers. Rotate the call time monthly so the pain is distributed, not concentrated.
Treating IST and PT as the same problem as IST and ET. They aren't. PT-IST has zero working overlap. Either your India team works 8pm-1am IST (terrible long-term), or your PT team takes 6am calls (also terrible). The realistic fix is async-first culture, not creative scheduling.
Forgetting DST. Pacific Time, Eastern Time, GMT and CET all observe daylight saving — but on different dates. India and most of Asia don't. Twice a year, your overlap windows shift by an hour for two weeks.
Recommended Default Meeting Slots
For a US-only PT + ET team:
Daily standup: 11am ET / 8am PT — 15 minutes max.
Sprint planning: 1pm ET / 10am PT — full 1 hour.
Retros: Async-first; live optional at 1pm ET / 10am PT.
For a US + Europe team (PT + ET + CET):
Weekly leadership: 9am ET / 3pm CET — keep PT optional.
Cross-functional: Rotate between morning ET and afternoon PT.
For a US + India team:
One shared sync per week: 9pm IST / 11:30am ET — owners must attend, others optional.
Everything else: PRs, design docs, recorded Looms. Don't try to make live calls work.
Stop Doing Time Zone Math In Your Head
If you're rebuilding the same overlap mental model every Monday morning, use a Time Zone Overlap Calculator instead. Pick the zones for everyone on your team, drag a meeting block, and see exactly who's awake and at their desk.
It handles DST, prints a shareable visual you can drop in a Slack channel, and makes the "wait, is that 5pm CET or 5pm GMT?" confusion vanish.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the longest overlap between PT and any European time zone?
PT and London (GMT/BST) share roughly 30-60 minutes of natural overlap during 9-5 hours on both sides — typically 9am-10am PT / 5pm-6pm BST. CET and points east have no natural overlap; one party is always working outside business hours.
Why doesn't my Outlook/Google Calendar handle this automatically?
Calendar apps know each person's time zone but don't visualize the gap. They tell you "5pm for them, 9am for you." They don't tell you "this is the only 90-minute window all day where everyone is awake." That's why dedicated overlap tools exist.
How do I run async-first standups with a 12-hour spread?
Three rules: (1) every team member posts a written standup in Slack/Linear at the start of their day, (2) blockers tagged with the on-call owner across regions, (3) one live 15-minute call per week for context everyone needs. Anything more frequent is performative.
Should we move the whole team onto one time zone in software?
No. Tools that do "team time zone" obscure the truth. The truth is your colleague is asleep. See it.