How to Change Timezone in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams ties many of its core features — meeting scheduling, calendar displays, and notification timing — directly to your timezone settings. If your calendar is showing meetings at the wrong hour, or colleagues are seeing your availability offset by several hours, the timezone configuration is almost certainly the culprit. Here's how it works, what controls it, and why the same steps don't always produce the same result.

Why Timezone Settings Matter in Teams

Teams doesn't operate in isolation. It pulls time data from multiple sources depending on how your organization has set things up. A meeting invite that looks correct in Outlook may display differently in Teams if the two applications are reading time from different places. Understanding which layer controls what saves a lot of troubleshooting time.

The three main sources Teams reads timezone from:

• Your operating system clock settings (Windows or macOS)
• Your Microsoft 365 / Outlook account regional settings
• Your Teams app language and regional settings (on some platforms)

Most confusion happens because users change one of these without updating the others.

How to Change Your Timezone in Teams on Desktop 🖥️

Microsoft Teams on desktop — both the Windows and macOS versions — doesn't have a standalone timezone selector built directly into the app. Instead, it inherits the timezone from your Microsoft 365 account settings.

To update it through the web:

1. Go to outlook.office.com or outlook.com and sign in with your Microsoft account
2. Click the Settings gear icon (top right)
3. Select View all Outlook settings
4. Navigate to General → Language and time
5. Under Time zone, select your correct timezone from the dropdown
6. Save your changes

Once saved, this setting propagates to Teams — typically within a few minutes, though you may need to restart the app to see the change reflected immediately.

On Windows, your system clock timezone can also influence Teams behavior, particularly for desktop notifications and meeting reminders. To update it:

• Open Settings → Time & Language → Date & Time
• Toggle off Set time zone automatically if needed
• Select your correct timezone from the dropdown

How to Change Timezone in Teams on Mobile 📱

The Teams mobile app on iOS and Android follows the device's system timezone rather than the Microsoft 365 account settings. This means your phone's regional settings take priority.

On Android:

• Go to Settings → General Management → Date and Time
• Disable Automatic time zone if needed
• Select your timezone manually

On iOS:

• Go to Settings → General → Date & Time
• Turn off Set Automatically if you need to override
• Select your timezone

If your phone's automatic timezone is enabled and GPS or carrier data is feeding an incorrect location, it will affect what Teams shows you for meeting times — even if your desktop settings are correct.

The Relationship Between Teams, Outlook, and Your OS

This layered structure means a remote worker switching between time zones frequently may need to update settings in more than one place. Meanwhile, a user who only accesses Teams through a browser may only need to update their Outlook/Microsoft 365 account settings to see changes everywhere.

Common Scenarios Where Timezone Changes Don't Stick

Several variables determine whether a timezone update takes effect cleanly:

Organizational IT policies — In managed enterprise environments, IT administrators can lock certain regional settings. If your timezone reverts after you change it, your organization's Microsoft 365 policies may be overriding personal preferences.

Cached app data — The Teams desktop client caches session data. After changing timezone settings in Microsoft 365, a full app restart (or signing out and back in) is sometimes required before the new timezone displays correctly.

Exchange Server configurations — For organizations using on-premises Exchange rather than Exchange Online, timezone handling can behave differently depending on server configuration and client version.

Multiple accounts — Users running personal and work Microsoft accounts inside Teams may see timezone conflicts if each account's regional settings differ.

Verifying the Change Worked

After updating your settings, the fastest way to confirm the change is to check an existing calendar event in Teams. Navigate to Calendar in the left sidebar and look at a scheduled meeting. The displayed time should now reflect your updated timezone. If it still shows the old offset, restart the Teams app fully — on Windows, right-click the Teams icon in the system tray and select Quit, then relaunch.

You can also create a test meeting and invite a colleague in a known timezone to verify that the scheduling display is accurate on both ends.

What Affects Your Specific Outcome

Whether a simple account-setting change resolves your issue or whether you need to coordinate with an IT administrator depends on several factors: whether you're on a personal Microsoft account or a managed enterprise account, which platform you're primarily using Teams on, whether your organization enforces group policy settings, and whether you're dealing with a one-time timezone shift or frequent travel between regions.

The steps above cover the most common paths — but which one applies to your situation depends on how your Teams environment is configured and who controls it.