Morocco has spent the last eight years as one of the odder time zones in the world. From October 2018 it kept the clocks an hour forward all year, so it sat on UTC+01:00 in January and in July alike, and the only time it went back was for the month of Ramadan.
That ended in September 2026. If you have guidebooks or notes from an earlier trip, they are wrong now.
What the time is in Morocco
Morocco runs on UTC+00:00, which is the same offset as Greenwich Mean Time. The whole country uses it: there is one time zone, Africa/Casablanca in the time zone database, and no regional variation between Tangier, Casablanca, Marrakech and the Sahara.
For most visitors the change has simplified things rather than complicated them. Morocco now sits on the same clock as the United Kingdom, Ireland and Portugal through the winter. In summer, when those countries move forward and Morocco does not, it is an hour behind them.
Against continental Europe it is one hour behind in winter and two hours behind in summer. Against the east coast of the United States it is five hours ahead in winter. Against India, four and a half hours behind.
Eight years of GMT+1
The 2018 decision was unusual, because most countries that keep a summer offset do it for part of the year. Keeping it permanently meant Moroccan mornings were dark later than they would otherwise have been, and evenings were light, which was the point: the country wanted the extra hour of daylight after work, and it wanted to sit closer to the business day in continental Europe.
What it also meant was the Ramadan exception, a piece of annual clockkeeping that no other country had. Each year, as Ramadan approached, the government announced that the clocks would go back an hour for the month, then forward again at the end. Fasting days run from dawn to sunset, so an earlier clock makes the day shorter and the evening sooner.
Why it went back
The reversal in 2026 came with reasons that will sound familiar to anyone who has argued about daylight saving: dark mornings, complaints from citizens, concerns about health, and the effect on safety when people travel to work before sunrise.
The practical benefit is that Morocco no longer has an exception to explain. There is no Ramadan adjustment, no annual announcement, and nothing for a visitor to look up before booking a flight that lands at dawn.
It also means the time difference between Morocco and Europe changes twice a year instead of being stable, which is a small thing to know if you work remotely. In the weeks either side of the European clock changes, the gap shifts, and a meeting that sat comfortably at ten in the morning may end up at nine.
What it means for a trip
Very little, in the end, which is the point of checking. Flights, trains and baggage handling all run on local time, and so does your phone.
Two details are worth having in your head anyway.
The first is arrival. If you fly overnight from London, Paris or Madrid and land in the morning, you will have lost between zero and two hours depending on the season, and the day is yours. If you fly from New York, you lose five.
The second is calling home. Because Morocco now sits close to Greenwich, calling at nine in the evening from Marrakech is a reasonable hour in Europe, and still mid-afternoon on the west coast of the United States.
Prayer times, Ramadan and opening hours
Morocco is a Muslim country and the rhythm of the day follows the prayer times, which move earlier and later through the year with the sun rather than the clock. Nothing about the 2026 change alters that; it only shifts the numbers on the clock.
During Ramadan, opening hours change. Some restaurants close during the day and reopen after sunset, government offices run shorter hours, and the evening becomes the busy part of the day. Shops in tourist areas often keep their usual hours.
In the weeks around the change, expect a few things to be out of step. A bus timetable printed months earlier may have been set under the old offset, and the same goes for a printed tour schedule. The times that matter, flights in particular, are handled by computers that were updated months in advance.
Booking across the offset
One habit worth keeping. When you book anything that crosses the border, write the time down with its offset rather than on its own. A flight at 07:15 is unambiguous. A call with a riad at nine in the morning is not, unless you have both agreed whose nine o’clock it is.
The time zone database is the authority on all of this, and the widget above reads from your own device rather than from us, so it stays right as the rules change. If you want the numbers side of the trip settled too, calling Morocco covers the country code and how to write a number, and an eSIM for Morocco covers getting online when you land.