Here’s how dates and times are handled in Cognito Forms with regard to time zones:
- Entries generate three different date/time values: Date Created, Date Submitted, and Date Updated. These values can be included as tokens in both content areas and notification/confirmation emails.
- With the exception of DateTime.Today values, dates and times shown to users via the web browser are always in the user’s time zone, not the form’s time zone. This means the date that appears on the confirmation page will be your local time zone.
- Dates and times that are transmitted as formatted text (Ex:
=Entry.DateSubmitted.ToString("dd/MM/yyyy")) are converted into the timezone of the form. This includes email messages, generated documents, and Excel exports.
Data integrations and JSON posts use the ISO 8601 date format for transmitting dates and times uniformly. This is now the accepted industry standard way of representing points in time in text format when a time zone must be specified. These dates are, therefore, in UTC.
These rules only apply to date/time values. Date-only and Time-only fields are “time-zone-less” and are never shifted based on time zone. So for now, these rules primarily apply to the entry dates.