It’s incredibly annoying. You glance down at your wrist after a long flight or a weekend where you let your tracker’s battery die, and suddenly, it’s 2022 or three hours in the past. Your steps are logging on the wrong day. Your sleep data is a mess. Honestly, for a device that’s supposed to keep your life on track, having the wrong timestamp feels like the whole thing is broken. But here is the thing: you can’t actually change the time directly on the watch face itself.
There is no "Settings" menu on a Charge 6, a Sense 2, or an Inspire 3 that lets you manually toggle the calendar. It’s not a Casio from 1995. Because Fitbit devices are designed to be "extensions" of your smartphone, they are basically mindless mirrors of whatever your phone thinks is happening. If you want to know how do you change the date on a Fitbit, you have to stop looking at your wrist and start looking at the app.
Most people assume the sync is automatic. It usually is. But when it fails, it’s usually because of a handshake error between the Bluetooth bonding and the timezone settings in your Fitbit profile. It’s a software quirk that has persisted through the Google acquisition.
The Sync Fix: Why Your App is the Boss
The fastest way to fix the date is to force a sync. Your Fitbit lives in a constant state of "checking in" with the Fitbit app (now increasingly integrated with Google accounts). If the time is wrong, it’s because the last check-in failed or the app is feeding it bad data.
Open the app. Tug down on the main dashboard screen. You’ll see that little rotating circle at the top. If it finishes and the time is still wrong, the problem is deeper than just a "missed connection." You’ve likely got a timezone mismatch. Fitbit doesn't just use your phone's GPS; it uses a specific setting inside your personal profile that can sometimes get stuck on "Automatic" even when the "Automatic" detection is failing.
Go into your app and tap your profile icon or the device icon in the top left. Look for App Settings. Inside there, you’ll find Time Zone. This is the culprit. If "Set Automatically" is toggled on, try toggling it off, manually selecting a different timezone, syncing, and then toggling it back to the correct one. It’s like jump-starting a car. You’re forcing the software to overwrite its cached data with a fresh instruction from the server.
Dealing with the "Dead Battery" Time Lag
We’ve all been there. You forget your charger on a three-day trip. The Fitbit dies. It stays dead for 24 hours. When you finally juice it back up, the time is frozen at the exact moment it lost power.
This happens because Fitbit trackers don't have a massive internal "CMOS" battery like a desktop computer to keep the internal clock ticking when the main power is gone. Once that battery hits 0%, the internal oscillator stops. When it wakes up, it’s a time traveler from the past.
To fix this, don't just charge it. Charge it, then open the app and sync immediately. If it doesn't sync, your phone might have "forgotten" the Bluetooth bond because the device was offline for too long. You might need to turn your phone's Bluetooth off and back on again. Sometimes, in stubborn cases, you’ll even need to restart the Fitbit itself while it's on the charger—usually by pressing the button on the cable or the side of the device for about 10 seconds.
The Timezone Trap for Travelers
Travel is the biggest reason people search for how do you change the date on a Fitbit. You land in London, your iPhone updates to GMT, but your Fitbit is still stubbornly clinging to New York time.
Why? Because the Fitbit app is designed to prevent "double-counting" steps. If it shifted timezones constantly based on every cell tower you passed, your data might get wonky.
If your travel isn't reflecting on your wrist:
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- Tap your profile picture in the Fitbit app.
- Hit App Settings.
- Tap Time Zone.
- Disable Set Automatically.
- Select your current city manually.
- Sync. Once the watch reflects the local time, you can usually toggle "Set Automatically" back on, and it will behave for the rest of the trip. Just remember that if you cross back over time zones, you might have to repeat this dance. It's a bit clunky for a modern piece of tech, but it ensures your "Heart Zone Minutes" and "Sleep Score" don't get calculated across a 27-hour day, which would break the algorithm.
When the Date is Right but the Format is Wrong
Sometimes the date is "correct," but it looks weird to you. Maybe you want the European DD/MM/YY instead of the American MM/DD/YY. Or maybe you hate the 24-hour clock.
You cannot change this in the mobile app.
This is one of those weird legacy things from the old Fitbit.com days. You actually have to log into your dashboard on a web browser (Fitbit.com) to change the clock display format. Go to your Personal Settings on the website, scroll down to Clock Display Time, and switch it there. Once you save on the website, you still have to go back to your phone and—you guessed it—sync the device.
The Nuclear Option: When Nothing Works
If you've toggled the timezone, synced until your thumb hurts, and restarted the watch, but the date is still from three weeks ago, you have a "stuck" bond. This is common on older devices like the Versa 2 or the original Luxe.
You have to "unpair" and "repair."
Go into your phone’s Bluetooth settings (not the Fitbit app, the actual phone settings). Find your Fitbit and select Forget This Device. Then, go back into the Fitbit app and act like you're setting up a new tracker. It won't delete your historical data—that’s stored on Fitbit’s servers—but it will force a brand new secure handshake. This almost always clears the "time lag" bug because it forces the phone to push a "Current Time" packet to the watch during the initialization.
Why Accuracy Actually Matters for Your Health Data
It’s not just about knowing when your next meeting is. If your Fitbit thinks it’s 2:00 AM when it’s actually 2:00 PM, your Ready Score and Sleep Stages will be total garbage.
Fitbit’s algorithms, especially the ones updated in 2024 and 2025 for the newer Google-centric ecosystem, rely heavily on "circadian windows." If the device thinks you are sleeping during your afternoon workout, it might flag your elevated heart rate as a medical anomaly or "restless sleep." It ruins your trends. Keeping that date accurate is the only way to make sure the "Health Metrics" dashboard actually means something.
Pro-Tips for a Permanent Fix
- Check the "All-Day Sync" setting: If you have this off to save phone battery, your watch is more likely to drift. Turn it on if you travel a lot.
- Update the Firmware: Sometimes a date bug is actually a known "epoch" bug in the software. Check for that pink arrow icon in the app.
- Location Permissions: If the Fitbit app doesn't have "Always Allow" location access, it can't always tell what timezone you’re in, even if your phone knows.
To keep things running smoothly, just make it a habit to open the app once every morning. That 10-second sync ensures the internal clock stays aligned with the atomic clocks your phone uses. It's the simplest way to avoid the headache of a time-traveling fitness tracker.
Next Steps for Your Device:
Start by checking your Time Zone settings in the Fitbit app under App Settings and toggle the Set Automatically switch off and back on. Follow this immediately with a manual sync by pulling down on the home screen. If the time still hasn't updated, perform a hardware restart by connecting your Fitbit to its charger and holding the side button until the logo appears. This force-restarts the internal clock chip and clears any persistent sync errors.