UTC+14 is the time zone among the first to enter each New Year.
UTC+14 is fourteen hours ahead of Coordinated Universal Time, the world’s reference time scale. It is used by the Line Islands of Kiribati, including Kiritimati, also called Christmas Island. When midnight arrives there, much of the world is still on the previous calendar date.
Kiribati shifted the International Date Line eastward around its islands in 1994. The change placed the Line Islands on the same calendar side as the country’s other island groups, helping the nation operate under one date. The result is that Kiribati’s eastern islands are among the first inhabited places to celebrate a new year.
The phrase “first country” can be misleading because time-zone boundaries, inhabited islands, and daylight-saving rules complicate simple rankings. UTC+14 identifies the civil time offset precisely. It does not mean that every place in Kiribati reaches midnight simultaneously, because the country spans several time zones.