Saudi Arabia Standard Time ( ar, التوقيت القياسي السعودي, At-Tawqīt al-qiyāsiyy as-suʿūdiyy), abbreviated as SAST, is the standard

time zone A time zone is an area which observes a uniform standard time for legal, commercial and social purposes. Time zones tend to follow the boundaries between countries and their subdivisions instead of strictly following longitude, because i ...

Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is a country in Western Asia. It covers the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula, and has a land area of about , making it the List of Asian countries by area, fifth-largest country in Asia ...

. The time zone is 3 hours ahead of UTC ( UTC+03:00) with no daylight savings. SAST is defined by the 45th Meridian East. Before a standardized time zone was introduced, the country used ''Arabic time'', in which clocks were set to midnight at sundown. Because of confusion between various other systems also used in the kingdom, the standardized use of a time zone was established.

History

Until 1968, Saudi Arabia used ''Arabic time,'' where clocks were set to 12 o'clock at sunset or when the call to prayer for the sunset prayer was heard. This was because the

Islamic calendar The Hijri calendar ( ar, ٱلتَّقْوِيم ٱلْهِجْرِيّ, translit=al-taqwīm al-hijrī), also known in English as the Muslim calendar and Islamic calendar, is a lunar calendar consisting of 12 lunar months in a year of 354 ...

defines sunset as marking the beginning of a new day. However this later conflicted with the introduction of western sun time, which defined, in congruence with Europe, the start of a new day to be midnight. With western sun time, clocks were set to six o'clock at sun set. While western sun time was intended to be approximately equal to GMT+3, it being reliant on sunset time, which changed with the seasons, meant that large disparity could emerge between western sunset time and GMT+3 as seasons progressed. In addition to this, the American Military Assistance Advisory Group introduced "Zulu time" which was aligned with GMT+4. Saudi Air used GMT+3 for most of the country, except for Dahran which was set at GMT+4. The American Arabian Oil Company, used to also observe daylight savings for its headquarters in Dahran. Similarly, the

Trans-Arabian Pipeline Company The Trans-Arabian Pipeline (Tapline), was an oil pipeline from Qaisumah in Saudi Arabia to Sidon in Lebanon, active between 1950–1976. In its heyday, it was an important factor in the global trade of petroleum, as well as in United States, Ame ...

also observed daylight savings for its pumps in the east of the country.

IANA time zone database

The

IANA time zone database The tz database is a collaborative compilation of information about the world's time zones, primarily intended for use with computer programs and operating systems. Paul Eggert is its current editor and maintainer, with the organizational back ...

contains one zone for Saudi Arabia in the file

zone.tab This is a list of time zones from release of the tz database. Legend Type * Canonical - The primary, preferred zone name. * Link - An alternative name (alias) which links to a canonical zone. * Link - A standard Link (as above). The dagger symb ...

, which is named Asia/Riyadh.

References

Time in Saudi Arabia Time zones {{SaudiArabia-stub