Almost 24 Hours of “Happy New Year”: How the World Enters 2026 in a Wave of Time Zones

New Year’s Eve on the planet stretches for almost a day: the first fireworks ignite at the International Date Line in the Pacific Ocean, and the last glasses are raised in Samoa. Formally, it’s one holiday, but in fact, it’s a long global “midnight marathon” that passes through dozens of time zones and cultures.

The beginning of the chain is the Line Islands (Kiribati), one of the most eastern “first” time boundaries on the planet (UTC+14). In Kyiv time, their New Year arrives around noon: while it’s still daylight in Ukraine, it’s already officially January 1st there.

Next, neighboring zones in Oceania join the celebration. Within the next hour (around 13:00 Kyiv time), the new year arrives in Chatham (New Zealand, with its unusual 45-minute offset), Tonga, Fiji, as well as certain stations and bases in Antarctica, which operate on “attached” time zones.

Australia picks up the wave a bit later: somewhere it’s already night, somewhere it’s still evening — the country spans several time zones. That’s why the “Australian New Year” can’t be reduced to one minute: Sydney and Melbourne celebrate earlier, Perth noticeably later.

In East Asia, the transition appears almost synchronous: Japan and both Koreas enter 2026 at about the same time when the celebration is already in full swing in parts of Australia. Next is China, then Indonesia, where time is again “split” into several zones: the country is spread over thousands of islands and operates in different time zones.

South Asia adds its own features: the region has countries with non-standard offsets, so “midnight” is not always a whole hour. Nepal, for example, traditionally stands out with its own time step, while India and Sri Lanka create a separate rhythm for the celebration — slightly “between” neighboring zones.

Next is Central Asia and Afghanistan, then the Caucasus. In Kyiv time, this part of the world “rolls over” the holiday closer to late evening — and here it’s especially noticeable how New Year arrives not as a front but as a wave: countries are nearby, but midnight comes at different minutes.

A key moment for the audience in Israel and Ukraine is midnight in Eastern European Time. Ukraine welcomes the New Year at 00:00 Kyiv time, and Israel falls into this same time corridor (in the winter period, the countries often find themselves in the same time zone). So while part of Europe is still “catching up” with the holiday, in Israel and Ukraine it has already arrived.

Then the New Year’s line passes through Central and Western Europe, further across the Atlantic to South America, and only after that reaches North America. Even in the USA, the New Year doesn’t arrive simultaneously: first the East Coast with New York, then the central states, mountain zones, and only then the Pacific Coast.

The finale is at the “latest” points on the planet, including Samoa: when it becomes January 1st there, in parts of Oceania the first day of the new year is almost over. This time gap creates the feeling of a “holiday lasting almost a day”: the world doesn’t just change the date, but experiences it in turn, moving from zone to zone.

And that’s why for readers in Israel, it’s always a double reference point — “when it’s already here” and “when it’s still there”: the global time map shows that New Year is not a point, but a long chain of decisions, habits, and hours that passes across the planet step by step, like news spreading in waves. NAnews — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency