Time in Lagos

Nigeria has used UTC+1 since 1919. Before that, Lagos kept a local time a little over 13 minutes ahead of Greenwich and then a half-hour offset. Today the whole country, from Lagos to Abuja and Kano, shares one zone, and the same offset is used by Cameroon, Benin, Niger, Chad, Congo, Angola and much of Central Africa. Neighbors to the west such as Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire use GMT, so crossing from Benin into Togo puts your watch back an hour.

Lagos sits at about 3.4° east, well west of the 15th meridian that UTC+1 nominally follows, so the clock runs ahead of the sun. Solar noon comes around 12:45 to 12:50 PM all year.

At 6.5° north, Lagos sees little seasonal change. The longest days, in June, run about 12 hours 30 minutes, from roughly 6:33 AM to 7:03 PM. In December daylight shrinks to about 11 hours 45 minutes, with sunrise near 6:52 AM and sunset around 6:37 PM. The rainy season and the dusty Harmattan haze from December to February change the light far more than the calendar does.

Offices commonly run 8:00 to 17:00, though many people leave home much earlier to beat the traffic. The Nigerian Exchange (NGX) trades from 10:00 to 14:30, Monday to Friday. Lagos is six hours ahead of New York in the US winter and five hours ahead from March to November, so a 10:00 AM start in New York is 3:00 or 4:00 PM in Lagos. For London, expect no difference in summer and one hour in winter. The time zone converter checks any other combination.