FATAL: Invalid TimeZone in PostgreSQL and How I Fixed It

Fixing PostgreSQL TimeZone Issues in Spring Boot

While working with PostgreSQL in a Spring Boot application, I ran into this error: FATAL: invalid value for parameter “TimeZone”: “Asia/Calcutta”

It turns out this happens due to two main reasons: the database timezone or the JVM timezone.

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1. PostgreSQL Database TimeZone Issue

To check the timezone of your database:

1. Open CMD or PowerShell and login to your database:

psql -U <user_name> -d <database_name>

Run:

SHOW timezone;

If the output shows “Asia/Calcutta”, that’s the cause.

How to Fix

a) Change timezone for current session:

SET TIMEZONE='Asia/Kolkata';

SHOW timezone;

b) Change timezone permanently for the database:

ALTER DATABASE your_db_name SET timezone TO 'Asia/Kolkata';

SHOW timezone;

2. JVM TimeZone Issue

Sometimes the JVM itself uses Asia/Calcutta, causing the JDBC connection to fail.

Check JVM timezone in a Spring Boot test:

@Test
void printJVMTimezone() {
    System.out.println(TimeZone.getDefault().getID());
}

If the output shows “Asia/Calcutta”, you need to fix the JVM timezone.

How to Fix JVM TimeZone

Run PowerShell as Administrator:

setx JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS "-Duser.timezone=Asia/Kolkata" /M

You should see:

SUCCESS: Specified value was saved.

Re-run your test, and now the output will show Asia/Kolkata.

✅ Key Takeaways

• Newer versions of PostgreSQL replaced Asia/Calcutta with Asia/Kolkata, causing timezone errors in modern setups.
• Both database and JVM timezones must be consistent.
• Fixing this prevents Spring Boot startup failures related to JDBC timezone settings.

This simple change saved me hours of debugging!

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