Working With an Offshore Development Team Across Time Zones

Working with an offshore team across time zones is mostly a scheduling and writing problem, not a talent problem. Agree one fixed overlap window each day, move status updates and decisions into writing, and plan around the weeks when clocks change. If your offshore team's time zone is Nepal's, UTC+5:45 all year, the overlap is predictable once you know the offsets below.

What is the time difference between Nepal and your team?

Nepal Time is UTC+5:45, with no daylight saving. That makes it 15 minutes ahead of India, a detail that trips up people and the occasional hand-typed calendar invite. The table assumes a Nepal working day of 10:00 to 18:00 and a client day of 9:00 to 17:00.

Brisbane stays on AEST all year, so it is always 4h15m ahead of Nepal. Perth is 2h15m ahead.

How do you choose a daily overlap window for an offshore team?

Pick one fixed window of 60 to 90 minutes, put it in both calendars, and protect it. Most teams need less live time than they think, as long as the time they have is used for decisions.

For Europe, the UAE and Singapore the window falls naturally inside both working days. For Australia's east coast it is the Nepali morning and the Australian afternoon. For the US East Coast it needs a shift: a Nepal team working 12:00 to 20:00 has its last hour, 19:00 to 20:00 in Nepal, at 9:15 to 10:15 am in summer (EDT) and 8:15 to 9:15 am in winter (EST). For the US West Coast, plan on asynchronous work with a single weekly call at an early or late hour, and rotate who takes the awkward slot.

Use the window for:

• Decisions that are blocking work.
• Reviewing a demo on the staging site together.
• Unpicking a misunderstanding that three written messages have failed to fix.

Do not spend it reading status aloud. Status belongs in writing, where it can be read at any hour.

What changes when the clocks change?

Nepal never changes its clocks, so twice a year every recurring meeting moves by an hour on the Nepal side. A standup booked for 9:00 am in London sits at 1:45 pm in Nepal from late March to late October, and at 2:45 pm for the rest of the year.

The dates differ by country, which creates a few awkward weeks each spring and autumn:

• USA and Canada: daylight saving runs from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November.
• UK and EU: from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October.
• Australia: New South Wales, Victoria, the ACT, Tasmania and South Australia run daylight saving from the first Sunday in October to the first Sunday in April; Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory do not use it.

For a few weeks in March and in late October and early November, the gap between the US and the UK is an hour shorter than usual, which matters for three-way meetings. Two habits prevent most mistakes: create recurring invites in the time zone of whoever has the least flexibility, and write every time in messages with both zones, as in "10:15 BST / 15:00 NPT". Calendar apps handle the Asia/Kathmandu zone correctly; people typing times by hand are where errors creep in.

Which async habits make an offshore team work?

Async collaboration means the work moves forward in writing while the other side is asleep. Teams that do it well share a few habits, and none of them needs expensive tools.

1. End-of-day handover. Each person posts what they finished, what is in progress, what is blocked and which questions need an answer from whom. Your morning starts with reading it.
2. Tickets that are ready before work starts. Each task in Jira, Linear or GitHub Issues has a goal, acceptance criteria and designs attached. A vague ticket costs a full day, because the question and the answer cross the time zones separately.
3. Recorded walkthroughs. A two-minute screen recording with narration, in a tool such as Loom, explains a UI bug or a design change better than a page of text.
4. One decision log. Decisions go in one place, such as a Notion page, a Confluence space or a pinned thread, with the date and who decided.
5. A staging site that is always current. You review finished work at the start of your day, and your feedback is waiting at the start of theirs.
6. Stated assumptions. When a question has no answer by the end of the day, the team proceeds on a written assumption and flags it for review, rather than stopping.
7. Blockers early. A blocker raised at the end of the Nepali afternoon reaches a UK inbox before lunch or a US inbox before breakfast. Raised the next morning, it costs a day.

What does a good weekly rhythm look like?

A weekly rhythm turns the habits into a routine that both sides can plan around. This pattern works for most web and software projects.

For urgent production issues outside the overlap, agree an on-call arrangement and a simple severity scale before launch, not during the first outage.

What about holidays and working weeks in Nepal?

Saturday has long been Nepal's official weekly holiday, and many local businesses work Sunday to Friday; teams that serve overseas clients commonly align to a Monday to Friday week or agree cover for Fridays. Ask which week your team works before you schedule anything.

Public holidays follow the Bikram Sambat calendar, so their Gregorian dates move each year. The biggest are Dashain and Tihar, which fall in the autumn, usually somewhere between late September and November, when many people travel home for an extended break. Ask for the year's holiday calendar at the start of the engagement and plan launches away from those weeks, just as you would around your own Thanksgiving, Christmas or Easter.

How Meritbyte Technologies runs the overlap

Meritbyte Technologies is a Nepal-based web and software development company working remotely with clients in the USA, the UK, Australia, Canada and elsewhere. Each project has a single project manager, a weekly written update and an always-available staging URL, which between them cover most of what asynchronous work needs. Work is planned in two-week blocks, each closed by a demo, and if you would rather have our engineers in your own standups, the Embedded model is built for that. Inquiries get a reply from a person within one business day.

Country-specific overlap details are on our pages for website development in the USA, the UK and Australia. For the wider case for Nepal as a location, read why companies outsource software development to Nepal; for the build itself, see our custom software development services.

Frequently asked questions

What time zone is Nepal in?

Nepal uses Nepal Time (NPT), UTC+5:45, all year with no daylight saving. That puts it 15 minutes ahead of India; 4h45m ahead of London during British Summer Time and 5h45m during GMT; 9h45m ahead of New York in summer and 10h45m in winter; and 4h15m behind Brisbane all year.

How much overlap does an offshore team need?

For most web and software projects, 60 to 90 minutes of reliable daily overlap is enough, provided status and questions move in writing. Teams doing heavy pair programming or frequent live design reviews need more, and may be better served by a nearshore team. What matters most is that the window is fixed and predictable, not how long it is.

Can a team in Nepal work US business hours?

A partial shift is common and sustainable: working 12:00 to 20:00 Nepal time gives about an hour with the US East Coast morning. A full shift onto US hours means working through the Nepali night, which tends to hurt health, retention and quality over months. A fixed short overlap plus good written handovers usually works better than a full night shift.

How do we handle urgent issues outside the overlap window?

Agree it before launch. Define severity levels, what counts as urgent, who is on call on each side, how they are contacted and the expected response time for each level. Write a short runbook for the most likely incidents, such as the site going down or payments failing. Most issues can wait for the next overlap window; the few that cannot need a named person.