I've written a simple class that implements a local timezone tzinfo object, deferring to what the time module exposes about the local zone. https://gist.github.com/gvanrossum/ef201fe313719305c4c7 There are two variations: one for systems that support tm_gmtoff and tm_zone, one for systems without those. Output of the test program: BetterLocalTimeZone Fri Aug 28 15:50:22 2015 PDT (-0700) Wed Feb 24 15:50:22 2016 PST (-0800) I'm not entirely sure why we didn't add this to the stdlib ages ago. (Maybe out of a sense of perfectionism, since time.localtime() may be wrong for dates in the past or future where different DST rules or a different standard offset apply? But why would we care, if we're fine with the time module's behavior?) -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)