Kiritimati is the inhabited island commonly identified among the first places in the world to reach New Year’s Day.
Kiritimati, also called Christmas Island, is part of Kiribati in the central Pacific. It lies in the Line Islands, which use UTC+14, the world’s most advanced civil time zone. As a result, midnight arrives there before it reaches locations in earlier time zones.
The island’s position relative to the International Date Line is partly the result of Kiribati’s 1994 time-zone adjustment. The change placed the country’s eastern islands on the same calendar date as its western islands, creating a continuous national calendar.
“First” claims can depend on whether the question means the first inhabited location, the first land, or the first large city. Kiritimati is the precise answer for the widely cited inhabited-island example, not Samoa or the uninhabited Pacific islands sometimes mentioned in similar discussions.