Everywhere in the world is now at least 24 hours into 2024, but some of us ring in the New Year long before others. It got us wondering: where is the first and where is the last place to celebrate New Year? Find a full list below.
We’ll all be familiar with the big countdown to midnight on December 31st. People around the world share a kiss with loved ones, reminisce on the last 365 days and make resolutions for the next trip around the sun. But while many of the celebrations remain similar, the clock strikes 12 at very different times depending on where exactly you are.
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Australia often gets credited with being the first place to hear the chimes at midnight, but even Sydney and the east coast is four hours behind the Pacific Island nation of Kiribati.
Consisting of over 30 islands and atolls, Kiribati is spread over hundreds of miles and the International Date Line loops around the nation’s easternmost islands so that they all fall on the same. This stops Kiribati’s eastern islands, including Kiritimati, from being an entire day behind the western edge of the country. Another interesting fact about Kiribati? It is the only country in the world to have territory in all four hemispheres.
After Kiribati come Samoa and Tonga, and then some of New Zealand’s outer islands.
At the other end of the spectrum, the last inhabited place on earth to celebrate the New Year is American Samoa, despite its proximity to Kiribati and other Pacific Islands. It is only the birds and wildlife who live on a couple of US territories – Baker Island and Howland Island – who have to continue to wait for the midnight gong, coming over a day after it happened in Kiribati.
Because of the redrawn International Date Line, these islands end up 24-26 hours behind the eastern part of Kiribati, despite being further to the west. It’s a bit confusing, we realize, but hopefully the image below makes it a little clearer.
Here is a list of the time in some different places around the world assuming Greenwich Mean Time is at midnight.
10 am – Kiribati
11 am – New Zealand
12 pm – Fiji and Eastern Russia
1 pm – Eastern Australia (Melbourne and Sydney)
3 pm – Japan, South Korea and North Korea
5 pm – Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia
7 pm – Pakistan
9 pm – Turkey, Iraq, Kenya and Western Russia
11 pm – Germany, France, Italy, Algeria, Belgium, Spain
Midnight – UK, Ireland, Ghana, Iceland, Portugal
1 am – Cape Verde and the Spanish Isles
3 am – Argentina, some regions in Brazil, Chile, Paraguay
5 am – Eastern Standard Time in the US – New York, Washington, Detroit and Cuba
7 am – Mountain Standard Time in the US – Colorado, Arizona
9 am – Alaska and French Polynesia
11 am – American Samoa
