Python Time 2025

By Eric — — 2 minute read

A quick reference for time...

Get the current time in UTC

from datetime import datetime, UTC

datetime.now(UTC)

datetime.datetime(2025, 1, 28, 23, 4, 45, 419714, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)

You might think you should use datetime.utcnow() but:

Deprecated since version 3.12: Use datetime.now() with UTC instead.

Also note:

datetime.UTC

Alias for the UTC timezone singleton datetime.timezone.utc.

New in version 3.11.

Get the current time in the local timezone

from datetime import datetime

datetime.now().astimezone()

datetime.datetime(2025, 1, 28, 16, 6, 8, 979640, tzinfo=datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(days=-1, seconds=61200), 'MST'))

Get the current time in some other timezone

from datetime import datetime
from zoneinfo import ZoneInfo

datetime.now().astimezone(ZoneInfo("America/Los_Angeles"))

datetime.datetime(2025, 1, 28, 15, 8, 38, 699557, tzinfo=zoneinfo.ZoneInfo(key='America/Los_Angeles'))

Convert a datetime to local time for a specific time zone

from zoneinfo import ZoneInfo

local_time = some_datetime.astimezone(ZoneInfo("America/Denver"))

Or to UTC:

from datetime import UTC

utc_time = some_datetime.astimezone(UTC)

ZoneInfo keys

Valid ZoneInfo keys come from the system, and are POSIX paths from some root directory. For example, on my Ubuntu machine this is /usr/share/zoneinfo.

$ ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/
Africa      Canada   EST      GMT+0      Iran               Libya      NZ-CHAT     right      US
America     CET      EST5EDT  GMT-0      iso3166.tab        localtime  Pacific     ROC        UTC
Antarctica  Chile    Etc      GMT0       Israel             MET        Poland      ROK        WET
Arctic      CST6CDT  Europe   Greenwich  Jamaica            Mexico     Portugal    Singapore  W-SU
Asia        Cuba     Factory  Hongkong   Japan              MST        posix       Turkey     zone1970.tab
Atlantic    EET      GB       HST        Kwajalein          MST7MDT    posixrules  tzdata.zi  zonenow.tab
Australia   Egypt    GB-Eire  Iceland    leapseconds        Navajo     PRC         UCT        zone.tab
Brazil      Eire     GMT      Indian     leap-seconds.list  NZ         PST8PDT     Universal  Zulu