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Converting time zone in Microsoft Power Automate

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This article provides a solution to an issue where you find a datetime in the wrong time zone.

Applies to:   Power Automate
Original KB number:   4557244

Symptoms

When you're passing datetimes through triggers and actions in Microsoft Power Automate, users may find a datetime in the wrong time zone. Users may wish to convert the time zone (frequently in UTC) to their local time.

Cause

It's because of services passing dates through in varying formats or time zones. Each connector may use a different datetime format or time zone.

Some services use strictly UTC time to avoid confusion.

Resolution

There are two ways to solve it - via an action or an expression.

Using the action

Power Automate has a built-in operation called Convert time zone.

Search for convert time zone and choose the Convert time zone operation.

Screenshot to search for the convert time zone action in Power Automate.

The Convert time zone operation has a few required inputs:

Screenshot of the required inputs in the Convert time zone operation.

Base time: The datetime you wish to convert. Source time zone: The time zone that the datetime is currently in. Destination time zone: The time zone you want to convert your date to.

See the Notes below for ways to find the current time zone.

Using the expression

Power Automate has an expression function for converting time zone.

Screenshot shows that Power Automate has an expression function for converting the time zone. 

convertTimeZone(timestamp: string, sourceTimeZone: string, destinationTimeZone: string, format?: string)
Required. A string that contains the time.
Converts a string timestamp passed in from a source time zone to a target time zone

You'll need to pass in the following ones:

timestamp: The datetime you wish to convert. sourceTimeZone: The time zone the datetime is currently in. destinationTimeZone: The time zone you want to convert your date to. format (optional): The format of the time zone you wish to convert your date to.

For example:

convertTimeZone(triggerBody()?['Date'],'UTC','Eastern Standard Time','HH:mm')

Here, timestamp is "triggerBody()?['Date']", the source time zone is UTC, the destination time zone is Eastern Standard Time, and the format is HH:mm.

For more information about this expression function, see the convertTimeZone.

Notes

Deciphering a datetime
Datetimes may come in different formats.

If your datetime has a Z at the end, it means it's in UTC time.

For example: 2020-04-10T01:28:14.0406387Z

For more information about datetime formats, see Standard date and time format strings.

You may get errors where your date time string isn't in the correct format. For example:

"The date time string must match ISO8601 format".

For more information about how to correctly format your datetime string, see the formatDateTime

Checking the time zone of an output
If you're unsure what the datetime time zone is currently in, you can run your flow to take a look out the datetime output format.

In this example, the Get forecast for today operation outputs the timestamp for when we got the forecast.

Screenshot shows an example of checking the datetime output format.

This datetime is using the ISO-8601 datetime format. We can see that this operation outputs the datetime in the UTC timezone.

Limitations

There may be limitations in some connectors on how the time zone is displayed. For more information on each connector, see Connector reference overview.