How to show multiple time zones in your Mac menu bar

Can the Mac menu bar show two time zones at once?

Not on its own. The clock at the right of the menu bar reads from your Mac's own time zone in Date & Time settings, and the options Apple gives you are about how that single clock is formatted: digital or analogue, with or without seconds, with or without the date. Change the time zone there and you have not added a clock, you have moved the only one you had.

That is why this comes up so often. The menu bar is the one part of the screen you can read without stopping what you are doing, and it is the obvious place to put something you need to glance at twenty times a day. Apple simply has not put a second zone there.

What macOS gives you instead

Two things, both of which live somewhere other than the menu bar.

The first is the Clock app, which has a World Clock tab. Apple describes it as a way to "easily check the time in selected cities around the world, and see when the sun rises and sets in those locations", showing a row of clocks alongside a world map. It is genuinely good, and if you only need to check occasionally it may be all you want. We have written about what the built-in world clock does well and where it stops.

The second is a widget. World clocks can sit in Notification Centre, which is one swipe or click away. Better than opening an app, still not a glance.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. A clock you have to summon is something you consult when you already suspect there is a problem. A clock that is simply present is something that stops you making the mistake in the first place, because you see that it is 9pm for someone before you send the message, not after.

How do you actually get another time zone up there?

You install a menu bar app. There is no configuration trick hiding in System Settings, and the how-to guides that suggest otherwise are usually describing the Clock app or a widget rather than the menu bar itself.

The install is the easy part. Every one of these apps works the same way: it adds its own icon to the menu bar, you add the cities or the people you care about, and their times appear either in the bar itself or in a dropdown when you click it. What varies, and what you should actually choose on, is how much of the work it does after that.

Broadly there are two kinds. A world clock tells you what time it is elsewhere, and the better ones add a slider so you can drag forward and watch the other zones move with you. Clocker is the best known of these, and it is free and open source. A scheduler starts from that same display and then answers the question you actually had, which is when everyone is free at once, and books it. That difference is the whole reason the category splits, and we go through it properly in our roundup of Mac menu bar time zone apps.

One warning worth carrying into the App Store. Several apps that turn up in menu bar roundups have no time zone feature at all: Itsycal is a menu bar calendar, and MeetingBar is a meeting launcher. Both are excellent at their actual jobs, and neither will show you what time it is in Sydney.

How many clocks actually fit up there?

This is the question the how-to guides never answer, and it is the one that decides whether any of this works for you.

The menu bar is a fixed strip, and on any Mac with a notch it is really two strips with a camera housing in the middle. Your app icons fill the right-hand side from the clock leftwards, and when they run out of room they do not wrap or scroll, they simply stop being drawn. Add enough apps and the ones furthest left quietly vanish.

In practice that means a menu bar app showing four or five cities as text will use a lot of room, and stacking it alongside a clipboard manager, a battery readout and a focus timer is how people end up with icons disappearing. Two habits fix it. Either pick an app that shows one summary in the bar and puts the detail in a dropdown, or use a menu bar tidier to hide the icons you do not need at a glance. Our piece on building a focused menu bar set covers the tidier options.

What to look for before you install one

Five things separate an app you keep from one you delete after a week.

Does it show people or places? Cities are easy to add and hard to read, because you still have to remember who is in Singapore. Apps that let you attach a name to a zone save you that translation every time.

Does it handle daylight saving by itself? Any app worth installing reads the system time zone database, so the gap between you and New York changes on its own when the clocks go forward. If an app asks you to enter a fixed offset, it will be wrong twice a year.

Does it know about working hours? Knowing it is 7am somewhere is only useful if you also know whether that is inside their day. This is the difference between a clock and something that answers a question.

What does it cost, and how? The category runs from free and open source to a monthly subscription for what is, in the end, a small utility. Clocker is free. Dato is an $18 one-time purchase. Atlas is $4.99 once. Some of the App Store clocks charge monthly, which is worth checking before you install.

What does it want access to? A world clock needs nothing at all. Anything that reads your calendar is asking for real access to your data, and it is fair to ask what it does with it.

Where Atlas fits

Atlas is a menu bar app for the second problem rather than the first. Your people sit on a world map with their working hours shaded, so a glance tells you who is awake and who is mid-evening. When you need a meeting it scores every fifteen minute slot across the next few working days, floats the fairest one to the top, and writes it to your calendar in everyone's correct local time. It is $4.99 once, with no account and nothing leaving your Mac.

If all you want is the time in Tokyo in your menu bar, a free world clock will do that perfectly well and you should use one. Atlas is for when the next question is always "so when can we all actually meet?".