MCP Time Server

Official MCP reference server for current time and IANA timezone conversion.

Free· Free and open source (MIT-licensed reference server maintained by the Model Context Protocol project).MCP Servers

Best for

Developers wiring MCP-aware assistants (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Zed, VS Code) that need grounded current-time and timezone-conversion answers without adding a paid API.

Skip if

Teams needing calendar scheduling, recurring-event logic, natural-language date parsing, or high-precision NTP-synchronized time -- this server is intentionally minimal.

MCP Time Server is a small reference Model Context Protocol server, written in Python and maintained inside the official modelcontextprotocol/servers repository, that gives LLM clients a reliable way to answer time-and-timezone questions without hallucinating dates. It exposes two tools over MCP: get_current_time, which returns the current wall-clock time in any IANA timezone (with a DST flag), and convert_time, which converts a 24-hour time from one IANA zone to another and reports the offset difference. The server auto-detects the host's local timezone and lets you override it with a --local-timezone flag, which is useful in containers and CI where the system TZ is UTC. It is trivially installable three ways: uvx mcp-server-time (recommended), pip install mcp-server-time then python -m mcp_server_time, or the prebuilt mcp/time Docker image. Configuration snippets are documented for Claude Desktop, VS Code, Zed, Cursor, and any other MCP-aware client that speaks stdio. It is intended for developers building agents or chat assistants that need grounded temporal answers, meeting-scheduling assistants that shuffle across timezones, and anyone tired of watching a model confidently invent a time in Tokyo. It will not fetch times from NTP or a network clock, will not parse natural-language dates, and does no scheduling on its own -- it is a deliberately minimal primitive that other tools and prompts compose with.

Editor's take

One of the highest-value-per-line-of-code MCP servers in the reference set. The fact that frontier models still fumble 'what time is it in Berlin right now?' makes this a near-mandatory install for any agent that touches scheduling, logs, or user-facing timestamps. Pair it with a calendar or search MCP for real utility.

— The AI Tool Bible editorial team

Pros

✅ Fixes a real, common LLM failure mode: guessing the current time or botching a timezone conversion
✅ Zero-config for most users -- uvx mcp-server-time works instantly on any MCP client
✅ Ships as an official reference server, so it stays in step with MCP protocol changes
✅ Three install paths (uv, pip, Docker) cover local dev, servers, and sandboxed agents
✅ Uses IANA timezone names and reports DST status, so results are unambiguous
✅ Tiny surface area (two tools) makes it safe to grant blanket permission to

Cons

⚠️ Only two tools -- no date arithmetic, no natural-language parsing, no recurring-event math
⚠️ Relies on the host's tzdata; stale OS images can return incorrect DST results
⚠️ No network time source -- accuracy is only as good as the machine's own clock
⚠️ Documentation is a README; no hosted docs site, changelog, or version-support policy
⚠️ Python-only implementation means an extra runtime if your stack is otherwise Node or Go

Use cases

Grounding current-time answers in a chat assistantTimezone conversion for distributed team schedulingMeeting-time suggestions across regionsLog-timestamp interpretation during incident triageTravel-planning assistantsCron and scheduled-job explanationDST-aware reminders in agent workflowsCorrecting model timestamps in RAG citations