Office hours by country

What time it is where your recipient works — and when everyone is at their desk.

Toronto is six hours behind Brussels, Paris, Berlin, Madrid and Rome for most of the year, and five hours behind Lisbon; Vancouver is three hours behind Toronto. This live board shows the local time in the seven countries FaxTelecom reaches, says whether offices are open (9 am to 5 pm on weekdays, as a guide) and works out today’s shared window.

Live board

Local time and office status in the seven destination countries
CountryLocal timeOfficesShared window (local time)
Belgium———
Canada———
France———
Germany———
Italy———
Portugal———
Spain———

Best shared window today

Working out the time…

Indicative hours of 9 am to 5 pm, Monday to Friday; public holidays are not taken into account. Daylight saving changes are applied automatically.

Canada spans six time zones

The board uses Toronto as Canada’s reference. Across the country, the gap with Brussels ranges from four and a half hours (Newfoundland) to nine hours (British Columbia).

  • Pacific — Vancouver—
  • Mountain — Edmonton—
  • Central — Winnipeg—
  • Eastern — Toronto, Ottawa—
  • Atlantic — Halifax—
  • Newfoundland — St. John’s—

Faxing at the right time across time zones

A fax takes a minute or two to transmit, day or night. What the clock changes is what happens to the paper afterwards: left in the tray of an empty office on a Friday evening, it may sit under other pages until Monday. Sending during the recipient’s working hours raises the odds that someone reads it the same day.

Within Canada alone, a clinic in Halifax faxing a pharmacy in Vancouver is four hours ahead of it, and St. John’s adds another half-hour. Faxing Europe from Ontario leaves a short overlap: when offices open in Toronto, most of the European working day is already over. Daylight saving makes it trickier, because North America and Europe switch on different dates — for two to three weeks in March and one week around the end of October, the gap shrinks by an hour.

The board relies on the official IANA time-zone database, which your browser keeps up to date, and recalculates every day the window when all seven countries are between 9 am and 5 pm. Actual hours vary by organisation: Service Canada, a provincial court registry or a pharmacy list their opening hours on their own websites, worth checking when a fax cannot wait.

Questions about time zones

Can I send a fax outside office hours?
Yes. FaxTelecom transmits around the clock, and the recipient’s machine takes the document even with nobody next to it. Office hours only tell you when it is likely to be read.
What is the shared window between Canada and Europe?
With offices open from 9 am to 5 pm, it lasts about two hours: 9 to 11 am in Toronto, which is 3 to 5 pm in Brussels. There is none for western Canada — 9 am in Vancouver is already 6 pm in Belgium.
Are public holidays taken into account?
No. They differ between countries and even between provinces or regions. The board only looks at weekdays, so check the local calendar before an important send.

Where to go next

Hand-picked pages to help you prepare, send or prove your fax.