Brazil Time Zones for US Teams: Overlap Hours by Season

When a US company asks whether a developer in Brazil can work with their team, the question is really about meetings: will stand-ups, reviews and incident calls happen during both people’s working day? For most of the US the answer is yes without any adjustment. For the West Coast it needs one decision, made once.

This post gives the numbers per US time zone and per season, the schedule that works for each, and how Brazil compares with the other regions US companies hire from. It goes deeper on one part of the complete guide to hiring a senior engineer in Brazil.

What time zone is Brazil in?

Brazil has four time zones, from UTC−2 to UTC−5, but almost every tech hub is on the same one: Brasília time, UTC−3. São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, Florianópolis, Porto Alegre and Recife all use it. The exceptions are in the west, such as Manaus (UTC−4) and the state of Acre (UTC−5), and a few Atlantic islands (UTC−2).

Brazil abolished daylight saving time in 2019, so Brasília time never changes. The US does change: daylight saving time runs from the second Sunday of March to the first Sunday of November (NIST). That is why the gap between Brazil and the US moves by one hour twice a year, and why a meeting set in São Paulo time “moves” for the US side in March and November.

How many working hours overlap with each US time zone?

The table assumes an engineer working 9:00–18:00 in São Paulo and a US team working 9:00–17:00 local time.

Arizona does not observe daylight saving time, so Phoenix stays 4 hours behind São Paulo all year.

For Eastern and Central teams this is effectively the same working day. The Brazilian engineer starts an hour or two earlier and finishes an hour or two earlier, which leaves a quiet stretch at the start of their day for focused work before the US team comes online.

What schedule works for West Coast teams?

Shift the Brazilian day later instead of asking anyone to work at night. Every hour the engineer starts later adds a shared hour with the Pacific, up to the full US day:

Agree on the shifted hours in the contract or statement of work, not as a favour, and say which season they refer to. A schedule written as “11:00–20:00 São Paulo time” stays the same all year for the engineer; the US side sees it move by an hour in March and November. Writing it in the engineer’s time zone avoids renegotiating twice a year.

How does Brazil compare with other places US companies hire from?

Same assumptions as above (a 9:00–18:00 local day against 9:00–17:00 in New York), in US summer:

Latin America as a whole shares most of the US day; the real divide is between the Americas and everywhere else. Within Latin America the differences are small and shift with the seasons: Mexico stopped observing daylight saving time in 2022 (timeanddate), so Mexico City lines up best with the Central and Mountain zones, while São Paulo lines up best with the East Coast. Choose on skills and English first; any of these time zones works.

How should a team use the shared hours?

More shared hours do not make a team faster by themselves. What matters is what happens inside them:

• Put the synchronous work in the shared window: stand-up, planning, design discussions, pairing on hard problems, incident response.
• Keep deep work outside it. The engineer’s hours before the US team comes online are the most productive of the day. Protect them from meetings.
• Write things down. Pull requests that explain the why, decisions recorded in the ticket, a short end-of-day note. Good written communication is what makes a team work across time zones, not the overlap.
• Put both time zones in every invitation. Calendar tools do this automatically, but a written schedule (“stand-up 10:00 New York / 11:00 São Paulo”) avoids the March and November confusion.