Pokémon GO runs on two different clocks. Weekly hours, Community Days and nearly every seasonal event fire on in-game local time — the same wall-clock reading in every time zone, separately. A smaller set of things, like GO Battle League seasons and GO Pass tiers, flip at one global instant instead. Which clock an event uses decides how you should play it, and it is the reason the board above marks some events as spoofable and others not. Here is every heading that can appear on it.
🌟Community Day
One featured Pokémon spawns almost everywhere for the whole window at a heavily boosted shiny rate. Evolve it during the event — or inside the short grace period after it ends — and the final evolution learns an exclusive Community Day move it cannot get any other way.
- How often
- Roughly once a month, almost always on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. Niantic also runs Community Day Classic reruns of older featured Pokémon, and a recap weekend in December.
- How long
- Three hours, historically 2:00–5:00 PM local time.
- Typical bonuses
- A rotating headline bonus on top of the spawns: extended Lure Modules and Incense, plus a multiplier on catch XP, catch Stardust or catch Candy. There is normally a paid Special Research story alongside it.
Time-zone window: The most valuable window on the whole board. A three-hour local event is live somewhere on Earth for 28 straight hours, so a Community Day you slept through is still running west of you for most of the next day — including the evolve window for the exclusive move.
🎪GO Fest
The biggest event of the year. Every habitat block swaps the entire spawn pool, the shiny pool is the widest it gets all year, and the legendary raid rotation changes through the day. Ticket holders also get a Special Research story and extra reward tiers.
- How often
- Annual, in summer, with city-specific live events in the run-up and a ticketed global weekend that can be played from anywhere.
- How long
- Two days, each split into rotating habitat blocks of about an hour.
- Typical bonuses
- Mostly ticket-gated: extra Special Research, additional trades, longer Incense and Lure duration, and a far wider shiny pool during your ticketed day.
Time-zone window: Habitat rotations run on local time, so moving west replays the habitat you missed instead of waiting a year for it to come round again. Ticket entitlements and research are tied to your account and do not move with you.
⚔️Raid Day
One raid boss takes over nearly every eligible Gym at once, so there is no hunting for a lobby: every Gym in view is the same target, and shiny odds for that boss are raised for the window.
- How often
- Occasional — a handful a year, usually attached to a Pokémon's debut, its return to the legendary rotation, or a Community Day follow-up.
- How long
- Three hours, typically 2:00–5:00 PM local time on a weekend.
- Typical bonuses
- Extra free Raid Passes from spinning Gym Photo Discs during the event, which is what makes a Raid Day worth grinding rather than raiding casually.
Time-zone window: The same 28-hour shape as Community Day. The extra passes are capped per account, so what moving west buys you is a much longer stretch of Gyms holding the same boss — not an unlimited pass supply.
⚔️Raid Hour
The current Tier 5 or Mega boss appears in nearly every eligible Gym simultaneously. Nothing about the raid itself changes — the entire point is density. For one hour you can chain raids back to back instead of walking between two Gyms an hour apart.
- How often
- Weekly, on Wednesday evenings, and it has been for years.
- How long
- One hour, 6:00–7:00 PM local time.
- Typical bonuses
- None inherent. Raid Hour is a density event, not a bonus event; any multipliers running during it come from whatever seasonal event happens to overlap.
Time-zone window: Being only an hour long makes Raid Hour the single best argument for the timezone ladder. It is live somewhere on Earth for 26 hours straight, and every zone you step west hands you another untouched hour of it.
🔦Spotlight Hour
One species floods the wild spawn pool for an hour. It is the fastest dependable way to farm a specific Candy, and when the featured species can be shiny, an hour of dense spawns is a great many checks.
- How often
- Weekly, on Tuesday evenings.
- How long
- One hour, 6:00–7:00 PM local time.
- Typical bonuses
- Exactly one rotating multiplier, announced with the schedule: double catch Candy, double catch Stardust, double catch XP, or double Candy for transferring.
Time-zone window: 26 hours end to end. Chaining Spotlight Hours westward while a double-Stardust or double-Candy multiplier is live is one of the highest-yield uses of a timezone hop, and it stacks with a Star Piece or Lucky Egg.
⚔️Raid Battles
The standing raid rotation across every tier — Tier 1, Tier 3, Tier 5, Mega, Shadow and Elite. This is the heading to check when you want to know what is beatable right now and what deserves a Remote Raid Pass.
- How often
- Continuous. The boss pool rotates every week or two, so the board shows the current rotation window rather than a single hour.
- How long
- Multi-day windows, one per boss rotation.
- Typical bonuses
- Rotation-dependent. Shadow and Elite raids run to their own schedules, usually weekends only.
Time-zone window: Rotation windows are days long, so stretching the deadline barely matters here. What does matter is population: teleporting into a busy urban Gym cluster is the difference between a full lobby and a failed Tier 5.
⚡Max Mondays
Max Battles take over Power Spots for the hour, with a featured Dynamax Pokémon appearing far more often than it does the rest of the week. Power Spots are fixed real-world locations, which makes this the event type most limited by where you actually are.
- How often
- Weekly on Mondays while a run is scheduled — these are booked in blocks rather than running permanently.
- How long
- One hour, 6:00–7:00 PM local time.
- Typical bonuses
- Usually a Max Particle bonus alongside the featured battles. Particles are the real bottleneck on Max Battles, so that is the part worth planning around.
Time-zone window: 26 hours, on the same one-zone-per-hour ladder. Power Spot density varies enormously between cities, so pairing the westward hop with a dense Power Spot cluster matters more here than for any other type.
🎉Seasonal events
The catch-all heading for everything shipped between the fixed weekly hours: themed spawn pools, swapped Field Research, costumed Pokémon, Collection Challenges and limited-time hatches.
- How often
- Several a month — seasonal celebrations, tie-ins, hatch events and collection challenges.
- How long
- Multi-day. Most open at 10:00 AM local time on the first day and close at 8:00 PM local time on the last.
- Typical bonuses
- Listed per event and usually stacked — reduced hatch distance, longer Incense, extra Candy or Stardust for specific actions.
Time-zone window: Both the opening and the closing run on local time, so the final day of any multi-day event is still live 25 hours after it has closed where you are. That is one of the most common reasons members teleport west at all.
The inhabited world spans 25 hours, not 24. Kiritimati in the Line Islands sits at UTC+14 and is the first place on Earth to reach any given wall-clock time; American Samoa, Niue and Midway sit at UTC-11 and are the last. That 25-hour spread is the whole trick. An event running on local time is playable somewhere on Earth for 25 hours plus its own length — 26 hours for a one-hour Spotlight Hour or Raid Hour, and 28 hours for a three-hour Community Day or Raid Day.
That is why the board above counts down to a Samoa last call instead of to your own local end time. Your clock tells you when an event stops for you; the UTC-11 clock tells you when it stops for everybody. Between the two sits most of a day of extra playtime, if you can move.
Working the ladder is straightforward. When the hour ends where you are, jump one zone west and it starts over — an hour later in UTC, but 6:00 PM again locally. Repeat until you run out of zones or patience. It works eastward too: hop to UTC+14 and you can play Tuesday's Spotlight Hour while it is still Monday afternoon across most of North America.
The real limit is not time zones, it is cooldown. Every long teleport starts a wait before catches, spins, raids and Gym actions register again, and it caps at two hours for anything intercontinental — comfortably inside a one-hop-per-hour ladder, but only if you plan the route before the event starts. The cooldown calculator gives the exact wait for any distance. Landing somewhere worth landing matters just as much: our hotspot list covers the dense city clusters that actually reward a hop, and live 100% IV coordinates show what is spawning in them right now.
The 25-hour ladder, first clock to last
One row per practical hop. Only the two anchors are load-bearing — neither observes daylight saving, so their offsets hold all year.
| Offset | Where that clock is |
|---|
| UTC+14 | Kiritimati, Kiribati — the first clock on Earth |
| UTC+13 | Apia (Samoa), Nukuʻalofa (Tonga) |
| UTC+12 | Auckland, Suva, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky |
| UTC+11 | Nouméa, Honiara, Sakhalin |
| UTC+10 | Sydney, Brisbane, Port Moresby, Guam |
| UTC+9 | Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul |
| UTC+8 | Singapore, Manila, Shanghai, Taipei, Perth |
| UTC+7 | Bangkok, Jakarta, Hanoi |
| UTC+5:30 | Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru |
| UTC+4 | Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Tbilisi |
| UTC+3 | Moscow, Istanbul, Riyadh, Nairobi |
| UTC+2 | Cairo, Athens, Johannesburg |
| UTC+1 | Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Lagos |
| UTC+0 | London, Lisbon, Accra, Reykjavík |
| UTC-3 | São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro |
| UTC-4 | Santiago, Caracas, San Juan, Halifax |
| UTC-5 | New York, Toronto, Miami, Bogotá |
| UTC-6 | Mexico City, Chicago, Guatemala City |
| UTC-7 | Denver, Phoenix, Calgary |
| UTC-8 | Los Angeles, Seattle, Vancouver |
| UTC-9 | Anchorage |
| UTC-10 | Honolulu, Papeete |
| UTC-11 | Pago Pago (American Samoa), Alofi (Niue) — the last call |
Two details keep this exact. Neither anchor observes daylight saving, so UTC+14 and UTC-11 are fixed year-round, while every mainland offset between them slides by an hour twice a year. And an event's end is evaluated per zone rather than per account, so the same event honestly reads “today” where you are and “yesterday” one hop away — which is exactly why the board relabels every event for whoever is looking at it.
Some of the best uses of those extra hours are not event exclusives at all. Location Backgrounds are stamped onto everything you catch based on where you caught it, so a westward ladder quietly builds a passport of them — the backgrounds guide covers which are worth the detour. GO Stamp Rallies run on local time too, and several have no end date at all, so live rally coordinates are always worth a stop while you are out there.
Several headings on the board are deliberately not marked spoofable, and it is worth knowing which before you spend a two-hour cooldown on one. GO Battle League seasons and rank resets, GO Pass tiers, most Timed and Special Research, and the seasonal rollover all turn over at a single global instant that everyone reaches at the same moment, whatever their phone thinks the local time is. Changing your GPS changes what spawns around you; it never changes what your account has already been served. They stay listed on the board because they still shape what is worth doing today — there is simply no Samoa last call to offer on them, because there isn't one to have.
Everything else on the board is fair game. Every member gets 10 coordinate reveals a day for free, and every channel — including the paid ones — is visible to every member, so you can see exactly what is being posted during an event before deciding whether to subscribe.
