What UTC offset does Afghanistan Time use?

Afghanistan Time uses the UTC+04:30 offset.

Afghanistan’s clocks are four hours and 30 minutes ahead of Coordinated Universal Time. The country uses this single national standard across its territory, despite spanning a broad east-west area that reaches across almost two geographical time zones. Afghanistan does not observe daylight saving time, so the UTC+04:30 offset remains in effect throughout the year.

The international abbreviation is AFT, for Afghanistan Time, and the IANA time-zone identifier is Asia/Kabul. Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, and Mazar-i-Sharif all use the same national offset. The half-hour value is the detail most likely to cause confusion: nearby Pakistan uses UTC+05:00, while India uses UTC+05:30. Neither is Afghanistan’s official time.

Afghanistan’s national use of one offset also illustrates that time zones are administrative decisions rather than perfect longitude slices. A country can choose one legal time nationwide for coordination, transport, government, and commerce. Because Afghanistan has no seasonal clock change, “standard time” and its everyday legal time remain the same UTC+04:30 setting.