Overview
- Kiritimati in Kiribati observes UTC+14, making it the earliest sovereign territory to enter 2026.
- Kiribati realigned its date boundary in the 1990s to unify the national calendar, leading to its UTC+14 designation.
- Midnight then sweeps west across the Pacific, including the Chatham Islands (UTC+13:45), New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga, Tokelau, Samoa, the Phoenix Islands, Tuvalu, Wallis and Futuna, and Nauru.
- The last places on Earth are the uninhabited Baker and Howland Islands at UTC−12, with the latest inhabited territories including American Samoa and Niue at UTC−11.
- Kiribati is 17 hours ahead of Peru, so midnight on January 1 there coincides with 7 a.m. on December 31 in Lima.