What time zone are the deadlines in?

Competition deadlines on uni.xyz are set in UTC. How to convert one to your local time, and why an upload that starts before the cutoff can still miss it.

All competition deadlines on uni.xyz are in UTC. Registration, submission and every other stage is stored and enforced in UTC. The competition timeline prints each date with a UTC label after the time, and if a deadline is shown anywhere without a time zone, it is still UTC.

Converting a deadline to your local time

Take the time shown on the competition page and adjust it by your own offset from UTC. A submission deadline listed as 15:00 UTC is:

What has to be finished by the cutoff

Attaching your work to an entry is a separate step from registering, and your project, journal or publication has to be published before you can attach it. Both of those have to be done before the submission deadline, not started before it.

Once the stored submission deadline passes, the Submit button disappears from your entry card on your profile's Competitions page, so leaving the attachment to the last minutes is where people get caught out.

Submit at least a day early

Leave yourself a day rather than an hour. That gives you time to notice an upload has stalled, fix a file that got rejected, or publish again if something goes wrong, none of which is possible in the last few minutes before a hard UTC cutoff.

If you missed a deadline

Deadlines run on the stored UTC time and there is no informal grace period. Withdrawing an entry yourself is also closed off once the submission deadline has passed.

If you believe a system error stopped your submission rather than a late upload, contact the UNI team so someone can look at your case directly.

View the related page on uni.xyz