 <p>The problem is not in Django settings, but in the <strong>date</strong> passed to the model. Here's how a timezone-aware object looks like:</p> <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; from django.utils import timezone &gt;&gt;&gt; timezone.now() datetime.datetime(2013, 11, 20, 20, 8, 7, 127325, tzinfo=&lt;UTC&gt;) </code></pre> <p>And here's a native object:</p> <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; from datetime import datetime &gt;&gt;&gt; datetime.now() datetime.datetime(2013, 11, 20, 20, 9, 26, 423063) </code></pre> <p>So if you are passing email date anywhere (and it eventually gets to some model), just use Django's <code>now()</code>. If not, then it's probably an issue with an existing package that fetches date without timezone and you can patch the package, ignore the warning or set USE_TZ to False.</p>