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Timezone setup — warehouse column types, the connection’s data timezone, and the project timezone — lives in Set up timezones. This page covers what happens once that’s configured: how a chart resolves its timezone, and how filters, dashboards, and scheduled deliveries behave day to day.

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The chart timezone badge

Every chart in Explore and on dashboards shows a small badge with its resolved timezone, for example (UTC +01:00) Europe/London. It’s the zone the chart’s filters, buckets, and values use, resolved by the rules in Report timezone resolution.
Resolved timezone badge in the Explore view
If it’s not the zone you expect, change it with the timezone picker.

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Report timezone resolution

A chart’s own timezone setting decides what zone it uses, unless an embed overrides it. The zone it ends up using is its resolved timezone, the term used throughout this guide. From highest priority:
  1. A direct embed’s timezone URL parameter (on iframe or shareable-URL embeds only, see Embedded dashboards). This outranks everything.
  2. Otherwise, the chart’s timezone setting applies:
    • Project timezone (the default): the project’s timezone, for every viewer.
    • User timezone: the viewer’s profile timezone, or the project timezone if they haven’t set one.
    • A specific timezone: that exact zone, the same for everyone.
See Choosing a chart timezone for how to set this.

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Choosing a chart timezone

Open the Run query settings (the dropdown next to the Run query button in Explore) and use the Timezone picker to choose how the chart resolves its zone. There are three options:
The Run query settings dropdown in Explore, showing the Timezone picker alongside Auto-fetch results and Row limit
Project timezone is the default, and it is not frozen at save time: it always resolves to the current project timezone, so a later change to the project setting flows through to the chart.

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How filters work

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Relative date filters

Relative filters like “yesterday,” “last 7 days,” and “this month” are computed in the chart’s resolved timezone. On a chart resolved to America/New_York, “yesterday” is the day that just ended in New York.

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Absolute date filters

Absolute date filters (a specific date or range) are unambiguous. 2024-03-15 is 2024-03-15, and behaves the same for every viewer. Filters that include a time of day (for example “events after 9am on March 15”) are more subtle. By default the datetime picker works in each viewer’s browser timezone, so the same typed value can resolve to a different moment for different viewers. To keep these filters consistent, a project admin can turn on Project time zone in filter inputs in Project settings → Timezone. Set a project timezone first; the toggle is disabled until one is set.
The Project time zone settings page with the Project time zone in filter inputs toggle
When it’s on:
  • The picker shows and interprets values in the project timezone, so the same typed value means the same moment for everyone.
  • A line under the picker shows the equivalent local time, and a label shows the active timezone.
  • Existing saved filters aren’t rewritten. They keep the same moment, just shown in the new zone.
If a chart overrides its timezone with the timezone picker, the filter inputs follow that override instead of the project timezone.
Absolute date filter picker showing values in the project query timezone

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Cell-click filters

Clicking a bar or cell filters on the value as shown, not the underlying instant. Click “March 2024” and you get March 2024 in the chart’s timezone, exactly what you saw.

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Day-grouped vs hour-grouped charts

Day and hour groupings respond to timezone differently, which changes how charts look across viewers.

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Day-or-coarser grouping

A chart grouped by day, week, month, quarter, or year buckets data by calendar boundaries, so when the resolved timezone changes (for example on a User-timezone chart) those boundaries move and the same events can land in different bars. Two viewers can then see different numbers on the same daily chart. This is correct, since each sees their own calendar, but it can be surprising. See Choosing a chart timezone to control it.

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Sub-day grouping

A chart grouped by hour, minute, or smaller buckets data by instants. The boundaries are the same for every viewer; only the labels shift (your “9am EDT” is someone else’s “2pm BST,” but the bar contains the same events). Sub-day grouping is consistent across viewers. The exception is half-hour and 45-minute offset zones (India, Nepal, parts of Australia), where bucket boundaries don’t align with whole-hour zones.

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MIN/MAX date and timestamp metrics

A min or max metric renders by the type of the column it aggregates, following the same calendar-vs-instant rule as dimensions:
  • DATE column (or a day-or-coarser date interval like _month): a plain calendar date at that grain, never shifted.
  • TIMESTAMP column: shifted into the resolved timezone, like a timestamp dimension.
Custom MIN/MAX metrics built in the Explore view pick this up automatically. Metrics defined in dbt or Lightdash YAML need a project recompile (Refresh dbt or lightdash deploy) before the new formatting applies.

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Daylight-saving transitions

Lightdash buckets data by local time in the resolved timezone, so daylight-saving transitions show up in your charts.
  • On a daily chart, the fall-back day spans 25 hours and the spring-forward day spans 23. Each bar still counts exactly the events in that calendar day, and drilling in returns them all.
  • On an hourly chart, the two 1 AM hours on the fall-back day merge into a single bar with double the count, and the missing 2 AM hour on the spring-forward day simply has no bar.
The hourly charts below count one event per hour in America/New_York. On the fall-back day (3 November), every hour has one event except 1 AM, which holds two: summer-time 1 AM and winter-time 1 AM land in the same bar.
Hourly bar chart for 3 November in America/New_York: every hour has one event except the 1 AM bar, which is doubled because the clocks fell back
On the spring-forward day (10 March), the clocks jump from 2 AM to 3 AM, so the 2 AM bar is missing entirely.
Hourly bar chart for 10 March in America/New_York: every hour has one event except 2 AM, which has no bar because that hour was skipped when the clocks sprang forward

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Your profile timezone

In your Profile settings, you can set a Default timezone. It affects only charts set to User timezone, which resolve to your profile zone when you view them. It does not affect:
  • Charts set to Project timezone or to a specific timezone.
  • Embedded dashboards (an embed has no viewer profile to read).
If you don’t set a profile timezone, charts in User timezone mode fall back to the project timezone. Scheduled deliveries are the exception to “no viewer”: a delivery runs its queries as the person who created it, so a User-timezone chart in a delivery uses the creator’s profile timezone, not each recipient’s.

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Dashboards

Every chart on a dashboard keeps its own timezone setting, so one dashboard can mix Project-timezone charts (same for everyone) with User-timezone charts (per viewer). Each chart’s badge shows the zone it resolved to. A dashboard date filter sends the same value to every chart, but each chart reads it in its own zone. So a “last 7 days” filter can cover a different window on a Project-timezone chart than on the User-timezone chart next to it.

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Scheduled deliveries

Scheduled reports have two independent timezone settings: The two don’t have to match. A delivery scheduled for “9am New York” can contain a chart in UTC: the report fires at 9am New York and shows UTC-bucketed data. For most schedules, the cleanest setup is:
  • Delivery time in the recipient’s working timezone (so the report arrives at a useful hour).
  • Chart data on the project timezone (so the numbers are consistent and explicable).

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Embedded dashboards

An embedded dashboard has no signed-in viewer, so there’s no profile timezone to read. Its zone resolves one of two ways:
  • A timezone URL parameter sets one zone for the whole session and overrides every chart. Available on direct iframe and shareable-URL embeds only, not the React SDK. See embedding URL parameters.
  • Otherwise, each chart uses its own setting: the project timezone, or a specific zone if one was pinned. A User-timezone chart falls back to the project, since there’s no profile to read.

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When things go wrong

Common symptoms and their usual causes. When something looks off, the chart’s badge and the connection’s data-timezone preview show exactly what Lightdash is using.
This usually means the chart is on User timezone, so each viewer gets their own day boundaries. Check the chart’s badge and switch it to Project timezone if everyone should match.
The chart could be on User timezone, with a viewer further west still inside a day the author has finished. Switch it to Project timezone to make it consistent.
The data timezone on the connection is probably incorrect. Open Project settings → Connection → Data timezone and use Preview to confirm how values are read.
The export may have run with a different chart timezone. Re-export from a chart set to the zone you want.
Your project timezone might be set to a zone where “yesterday” hasn’t started yet. Check it under Project settings → Timezone.
This is likely a daylight-saving transition in the period shown. Switch the chart to UTC to confirm it’s a DST artifact, not a data problem.

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Example: one row, four configurations

Imagine one row in your orders table: Same row, same warehouse. Here’s what changes as you layer settings on.
The pattern. Timestamp rendering and bucketing shift with the resolved zone. DATE values never shift. But anything derived from “now” (relative filters) always uses the resolved zone, regardless of column type.