How-to

How to Show More Than 3 Time Zones in Google Calendar (and Shade Off-Hours)

Published October 2026.
Full disclosure: we make Offer Times, the extension this post recommends. We’ve tried to be clear about what Google Calendar already does well and where other tools fit.

Short answer: Google Calendar shows at most three time zones (your own plus two more), and it only labels the hours. It doesn’t show whether a time falls in someone’s working day. To see more zones and spot off-hours at a glance, install the free Offer Times extension. It adds up to four extra time zone columns beside Google’s and greys out evenings and nights in each one.

The problem: Google Calendar labels the hour, but you still have to work out whether it’s reasonable

Google Calendar now lets you show up to three time zones, up from two. That helps. But each one is still just a column of hour labels. When you’re picking a time for people in other places, you still have to answer the real question yourself:

Is 4pm here a reasonable time for them?

Answering it means reading across the columns, remembering where everyone’s day starts and ends, and doing the math in your head while you drag across the grid. Most cross-time-zone scheduling mistakes happen there, not in the conversion. Nobody gets 9am London wrong. They miss that 9am London is 4am in Chicago, because the label didn’t stand out.

It gets worse when:

• You work with more than three places. A team in San Francisco, New York, London and Bangalore is already four zones. Google stops at three, so the fourth is back to mental arithmetic or a separate world-clock tab.
• You schedule for someone else. Executive assistants, recruiters and coordinators work with zones that aren’t their own, often several in one week.
• You need overlap, not just conversion. Finding the two-hour window where everyone is awake is a pattern problem. Rows of numbers are a poor way to see patterns.
• You’re offering times to someone senior or external. Proposing a 7am slot to a client looks careless, even when it was an honest mistake.

What Google Calendar does natively

In Google Calendar’s settings, under Time zone, you can show secondary time zones and give each one a label. They appear as extra hour columns on the left of week and day view. That’s free and built in, and if you only ever deal with one other place, it may be all you need.

What it doesn’t do:

• show more than three time zones in total
• mark working or non-working hours in any zone except your own
• change anything about the times you send people

How Offer Times fixes it

Offer Times is a free browser extension for Google Calendar. Its main job is letting you pick open slots on your calendar and copy them as ready-to-send text instead of a booking link. On the free plan, it also adds two things to the calendar grid:

1. Up to four extra time zone columns

Offer Times adds up to four time zone columns next to Google’s own. They match Google’s row height, font and dark mode, and scroll with the grid. You can label each one, for example “Lisbon”, “Client” or a teammate’s name, so you’re reading people instead of offsets.

2. Shaded non-working hours in every zone

Evenings and nights are greyed out in every time zone column, including Google’s. Daytime in each zone stays clear. The overlap where everyone is working shows up as the band with no grey, so you can see it without doing any math.

Only you see the shading. It doesn’t touch your events or what anyone else sees, and you can switch it off at any time.

3. The same zones in the times you send

Seeing the right time is half the job. The other half is telling the other person. When you select slots and copy them with Offer Times, each slot can be written in their time zone, or in several at once:

Tue, Nov 3: 9–10am ET / 2–3pm GMT
Wed, Nov 4: 11am–12pm ET / 4–5pm GMT

The time zones you use to see a reasonable time on the calendar are the same ones the recipient sees in your email.

How to set it up (about a minute)

1. Install Offer Times from the Chrome Web Store, free.
2. Open Google Calendar in week or day view, then open Offer Times and go to Settings › Timezones.
3. Add time zones by searching for a city (“boston” works; you don’t need to know America/New_York). Tick Show in calendar for each one you want as a column.
4. Optionally give each column a short label.
5. Leave Shade non-working hours on. It’s on by default.

Why four columns?

Each extra column takes width from your calendar. With Google’s three and our four, you can follow seven time zones at once, which covers almost every real team. With shading, you rarely need a column for every city anyway: if the grey lines up, you already know the slot works.

Offer Times vs. dedicated time zone extensions

Offer Times isn’t the only way to do this. Dedicated extensions such as Overlappr focus only on time zones, and Sundial includes multiple named time zones in a broader paid suite for heavy schedulers. If you only want a time zone overlay and nothing else, a dedicated tool is a reasonable choice.

Offer Times makes sense if you also send times to people. The columns and shading help you pick the slot, and the copied text shows it in the recipient’s time zone, all in one extension, free.

Who this is for

• Distributed teams finding standup and planning slots across three or more regions.
• Executive assistants scheduling for executives who travel or work with offices abroad.
• Recruiters setting up interviews with candidates and panels in different places.
• Founders, investors and consultants meeting clients and partners in other time zones.
• Anyone who has ever sent a 6am invite by accident.

FAQ

How many time zones can Google Calendar show?

Three: your primary time zone plus up to two secondary ones. They appear as hour labels only. Google doesn’t mark working hours in any of them.

How do I show more than 3 time zones in Google Calendar?

Use an extension. Offer Times adds up to four extra time zone columns next to Google Calendar’s own, free.

Can Google Calendar show working hours in another time zone?

Not natively. Google’s working hours setting applies only to your own calendar. Offer Times greys out evenings and nights in every time zone column, so you can see whether a slot falls inside someone else’s day.

Is it really free?

Yes. Time zone columns and off-hours shading are part of the free plan, for everyone.

Can other people see the columns or shading?

No. Everything is drawn in your browser. Your calendar, your events and what attendees see stay the same.

Does it work in Outlook?

Offer Times works with Outlook on the web for sharing availability as text. The extra time zone columns and shading are currently Google Calendar only.

Related: The 4 best tools to share your Google Calendar availability as text · Time zones FAQ