Schedule publish date shown in UTC not local time

[jonrigney]

When you go to schedule publish an item in the BackOffice and the date choses switches to BST e.g. 2026-04-01 14:00 it will show in UTC format e.g. 13:00.

For non-technical users of the Back Office this can be quite confusing, and would be much better to be formatted to the local time of the user/browser so if I am in BST zone then it shows as 14:00

This is for when selecting the date, but if you look at the info tab it shows in UTC there. Going to assume that other dates ignore user/browser timezones?

Would be better to store in UTC, but display in local user/browser timezone?

[iOvergaard]

Hi, which version is this? Since version 16.4, all datetimes have been stored in UTC but displayed in the local time zone (as configured in either your operating system or browser).

Could you share some more information, such as which time zone your server is configured for? What is your operating system set to?

[jonrigney]

This is with Heartcore of which the CMS version number is unknown

[iOvergaard]

You will have to forgive me for asking since you are on the CMS tracker. For derived products - such as Umbraco Heartcore - it takes a while for updates to the CMS to trickle down. As another commenter has said, this has been addressed in version 17. As soon as Umbraco Heartcore lands on Umbraco 17 internally, you should see the issue addressed.

Meanwhile, it might be worth raising an issue over on the Heartcore Issues tracker, seeing that they may have some answers about this, as it could, in theory, be possible that the dates are stored the wrong way.

Apart from that, you can always raise a concern through the support chat reachable when you are logged in to Umbraco Cloud.

[jonrigney]

Thanks for getting back to me.. i'll sit back and wait.. ta

[Girish-kl33]

Yeah — what you're seeing has been a known inconsistency in Umbraco, especially in older versions and some Cloud/Heartcore setups.

The general approach is:

• Dates are stored in UTC
• But should be shown in the editor’s local time

In practice though, older versions don’t always handle this consistently. It’s quite common to see:

• The picker showing local time (e.g. 14:00 BST)
• While other places (like the Info tab) show UTC (13:00)

There have been a few discussions around this as well:

• https://forum.umbraco.com/t/inconsistent-content-schedule-challenge-for-umbraco-cloud-why-is-it-an-hour-off/6867
• Timezone not set correctly #11948

The good news is that in v17 this has been properly cleaned up — date/times have been normalised so they’re stored in UTC and consistently shown in the user’s local/browser timezone, which avoids this kind of confusion.