Stop your agent guessing the time with the Time MCP server
The official Time MCP server gives an agent the real current time and clean timezone conversion. How to add it to Cursor and Claude, and what I saw testing version 2026.11.11.
A model has no clock. Ask it what day it is and it guesses from its training data or from whatever the chat happens to mention. Ask it what 10am in Cairo is in Los Angeles and it does the arithmetic in its head, which goes wrong around daylight saving changes. The Time server is the small reference fix from the Model Context Protocol project. It reads the real clock and does timezone math with the IANA database, so the agent stops guessing.
It is a Python package, mcp-server-time, and the current release is 2026.11.11, published with the v2.4.0 release of the reference servers on November 11. It makes no network connections and needs no key. I ran that version locally before writing this, and the notes below come from that run and the official README.
The three tools
get_current_time returns the current date and time in a timezone you name, or in the server's local timezone if you leave it out. The result includes the day of the week and whether daylight saving is in effect.
convert_time takes a time in 24 hour HH:MM form and converts it from one timezone to another, with the time difference in hours.
get_time_ago returns the time a given number of days, hours, minutes and seconds ago, which helps with questions like what happened in the last five hours.
Add it to Cursor or Claude
The easiest way to run it is uvx, which downloads and runs the package without a separate install step. You need uv installed and Python 3.10 or later. Put this in your client's MCP config:
In Cursor that goes in mcp.json in your home folder or your project. In Claude Desktop it goes in claude_desktop_config.json. VS Code uses the same block under a servers key. If you prefer pip, run pip install mcp-server-time and use python with the args -m and mcp_server_time instead of uvx.
Set your timezone if the server sits somewhere else
By default the server detects the system timezone and uses it whenever a call leaves the timezone out. That is right on your own laptop. If the server runs on a remote box or in a container, add a --local-timezone argument with your IANA name, for example --local-timezone=Africa/Cairo, to the args list.
The Docker image cannot see the host timezone at all. It reads a LOCAL_TIMEZONE environment variable when the container starts and falls back to UTC when it is unset, so pass it with -e or your agent will quietly work in UTC.
What I saw when I tested it
I started 2026.11.11 with uvx and drove it over stdio. It reported itself as mcp-time 2026.11.11 and listed the three tools. get_current_time for Cairo returned the right local time, Saturday, with daylight saving off. Converting 10:00 in Cairo to Los Angeles returned midnight the same day and a difference of minus 10 hours. Asking for two and a half hours ago in London returned the matching time, with hours and minutes added together as the README describes.
Timezone names have to be exact. Calling get_current_time with africa/cairo in lower case returned an error result saying no time zone was found with that key, rather than a wrong answer. That is good behavior, because the model can read the error and retry with the correct name.
Details that save you a bug
Every tool returns structured output plus the same JSON as text, so clients that ignore structured results still get the data.
On the night a clock change repeats an hour, convert_time returns the first occurrence and reports the second in a later_occurrence field instead of guessing. On other days that field is null.
A wall clock time that is skipped by a clock change is an error, not a silent shift.
get_time_ago counts back elapsed time, so across a daylight saving change one day ago is exactly 24 hours ago and the clock reading can differ by an hour.
convert_time works on today's date in the source timezone. It takes a time, not a full date, so it is not a calendar tool.
Find it on PlugMCP
The Time listing on PlugMCP has install configs for each client. It pairs well with the Memory and Fetch reference servers, which we covered in earlier posts. If your agent can call MCP tools, the PlugMCP directory MCP server lets it search listings like this one and fetch the config itself.
Time listing: https://plugmcp.ai/mcp/modelcontextprotocol-server-time
