Time MCP Server
Official MCP server for time and timezone operations. Tells Claude what time it is anywhere on Earth and converts between timezones — with zero configuration required.
The Time MCP Server is one of the smallest tools in the official MCP reference collection. It does exactly two things: tell you what time it is in any timezone, and convert a time between timezones.
That’s the entire feature set. No weather, no calendar, no holiday data. Just grounded, deterministic timestamps — which turns out to be exactly what agents need when they’re scheduling tasks, generating log entries, or reasoning about user-local time without hallucinating plausible-sounding numbers.
Tools
get_current_time
Returns the current wall-clock time for a given IANA timezone:
{
"timezone": "Europe/Berlin"
}Response includes the local time string, current UTC offset, and whether DST is active. Omit the parameter and you get UTC.
convert_time
Takes a time value plus source and target timezones:
{
"time": "09:00",
"source_timezone": "America/New_York",
"target_timezone": "Asia/Tokyo"
}Returns the converted time with offset data for both zones. Useful when an agent needs to schedule a meeting across regions without guessing arithmetic.
Installation
Add to your Claude Desktop claude_desktop_config.json:
{
"mcpServers": {
"time": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "@modelcontextprotocol/server-time"]
}
}
}No environment variables. No API key. Node.js is the only dependency.
When This Is Worth Adding
Add it if your Claude workflows involve any of:
- Scheduling reminders, tasks, or calendar entries
- Generating timestamps for logs, emails, or commit messages
- Reasoning about deadlines across multiple timezones
- Answering questions like “what time is it in Tokyo right now?”
Skip it if your use case is purely code generation or document work where time context is irrelevant. It’s a small server but it does add startup overhead.
Limitations
The Time server handles time-of-day and timezone conversion — nothing else. It won’t calculate business days, apply working-hours constraints, or know about public holidays. For those requirements, you’ll need a more capable scheduling tool or a custom MCP server. For grounded timestamps with zero setup overhead, though, this is the cleanest option available.