We run Wadifa Info, a Moroccan site that lists public-sector recruitment exams. Exam times are local, so a wrong offset for Morocco is a real problem for our readers.
On 20 September 2026 at 02:00, Morocco moved its clocks back to 01:00 and stayed there. The country is now on GMT (UTC+0) all year. The legal basis is decree 2.26.530, published in Official Bulletin no. 7521, which repeals the 2018 decree that created permanent GMT+1.
What changed for developers
From 2018 to 2026, Morocco was one of the odd cases in time zone handling. It sat on UTC+1, then dropped to UTC+0 during Ramadan, on dates that moved every year. That rule is gone.
The IANA time zone database carries the change from release 2026c, dated 8 July 2026, for two zones: Africa/Casablanca and Africa/El_Aaiun.
A one-line test
Ask your runtime for the offset on a date after the change:
from datetime import datetime
from zoneinfo import ZoneInfo
print(datetime(2026, 12, 1, 12, tzinfo=ZoneInfo("Africa/Casablanca")).utcoffset())
# 0:00:00 means your data is current. 1:00:00 means it is old.
We ran this on one of our own machines while writing this post. It printed 1:00:00, because Python was using tzdata 2026b.
Where it still goes wrong
-
Bundled time zone data. Python's
tzdatapackage, npm packages and container images ship their own copy, which only changes when you update them. - Old operating system images. A server that has not been patched since before July 2026 keeps the old rule. On our own Windows host, we stopped trusting the system zone data for Morocco and work from UTC directly.
- Hard-coded Ramadan tables. Code that switches Morocco to UTC+0 during Ramadan can be removed for dates from 20 September 2026. Keep it for historical dates.
- Static text. Travel guides and company pages often say "Morocco is GMT+1". When we checked about 100 pages on 31 October 2026, we found 28 sites still saying so, including some live clocks.
Time differences now
| City | European or US winter | European or US summer |
|---|---|---|
| London | Same time | Morocco 1 h behind |
| Paris, Madrid | Morocco 1 h behind | Morocco 2 h behind |
| New York | Morocco 5 h ahead | Morocco 4 h ahead |
| Dubai | Morocco 4 h behind | Morocco 4 h behind |
The decree details and a fuller table are on our page.
This article was created with the help of AI. The test above was run and the facts were checked against the decree and the tz database NEWS file.
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