How to confirm a meeting time in English across two time zones

"Your time or my time?" can work in a quick conversation. Naming the location is clearer if either person is travelling or several people are involved.

Try: "When you say nine, do you mean nine in Toronto?" Or: "Which city should I use when I check the time?"

If the answer is only a country, ask for the city or the specific time zone. You do not need to guess a location from someone's accent, phone number or usual office.

If you miss part of the answer, use a specific clarification question before moving on.

Keep the question focused. You are clarifying the proposed time, not yet accepting it. "Let me check what that is here" leaves space to discover that the call would fall outside your availability.

Missing information	A question you can use
Morning or evening	Do you mean nine in the morning or nine at night?
Location behind the clock time	Is that the local time in your office's city?
Exact date	Which date do you mean by tomorrow?
Where you will join from	I'll be travelling that day. Can we check the time for my location then?

The British Council's appointment-confirmation worksheet models a confirmation with a clear date, time and place. For a remote call, you also need to establish which location or zone the time belongs to.

Use the month name when reading a date aloud: "the twenty-second of September." In writing, a form such as "22 September 2026" removes the need to interpret a numeric month/day order.

If a checked conversion crosses midnight, say both dates. Do not reduce the confirmation to "ten for me, three for you" when those times belong to different days.

A reusable sentence is: "That's [date and time] in [your city], and [date and time] in [my city]. Have I got that right?"

Fill in the values only after checking them. This is a way to communicate a conversion, not a substitute for calculating it correctly.

Do not assume that a time difference you used months ago still applies. Timeanddate's clock-change documentation explains how to check changes by location and year, and notes that daylight-saving rules can change.

Use a current converter or calendar with both locations and the intended date. If an abbreviation in a message is unclear, ask what the sender means rather than silently interpreting it. A useful reply is: "Could you give me the city for that time zone so I can check the right date?"

For a recurring call, clarify what should stay fixed: "Do we keep nine in your location every week, even when the time changes here?" Do not promise a permanent offset or assume that every occurrence will have the same local time for everyone.

Once you have checked the conversion, repeat the arrangement and ask the other person to confirm it. Keep the meeting's purpose or title in the message so you are not discussing two different calls.

For example: "For our conversation lesson, I have [my local date and time], which is [your local date and time]. Is that the slot you meant?"

When an invitation arrives, compare its displayed date and time with what you agreed. If they differ, describe the mismatch without guessing which person made the error:

"The invitation shows a different time from our message. Can we check which one is intended before I accept?"

Changing a note in your own calendar does not resolve a disagreement with the organiser. Ask them to correct or confirm the arrangement. If the checked time is inconvenient, use the rescheduling conversation guide to propose a different slot.

Use these invented locations only for this exercise. On the practice date, Eastport's clock is five hours ahead of Westport's. This is supplied exercise information, not a claim about real places or time-zone rules.

Give one person the Westport card and the other the Eastport card. Neither should show their card until the conversation ends.

Card	What the speaker knows
Westport organiser	You want a call at 10 p.m. on 8 October. You first say, "Can we talk at ten?" You have not told the other person your location or whether you mean morning or evening.
Eastport participant	Your clock is five hours ahead for this exercise. You can join at 3 p.m. on 9 October, but you cannot join at 3 a.m.

The participant asks for the missing details, then checks the result: 10 p.m. on 8 October in Westport is 3 a.m. on 9 October in Eastport. That proposed call does not work for the participant.

Try this response: "That would be three in the morning on the ninth here, so I can't make it. Could we find a daytime slot for both of us?"

If the organiser instead offers 10 a.m. on 9 October, the corresponding Eastport time is 3 p.m. on 9 October. That matches the participant's availability. Repeat both full local dates and times before ending.

Compare the cards afterward. Did you catch morning versus evening? Did you carry the date forward when crossing midnight? Did you accept only the slot that actually worked? A fluent-sounding "Yes, ten is fine" would not resolve any of those questions.