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Guide

Market trading hours in your time zone

Exchange hours are published in local time, which means the moment your market opens moves twice a year relative to everyone else. For anyone trading across borders, the open is a moving target — and the overlap between sessions is where most of the volume sits.

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The main sessions and where they meet

The New York Stock Exchange runs 9:30am to 4:00pm Eastern. The London Stock Exchange runs 8:00am to 4:30pm UK time. Tokyo runs 9:00am to 3:00pm Japan time with a lunch break. Sydney runs 10:00am to 4:00pm.

The London and New York sessions overlap between roughly 2:30pm and 4:30pm UK time, and that window carries a disproportionate share of daily volume in globally traded instruments. The Tokyo and London sessions barely touch; Tokyo and Sydney overlap substantially.

Daylight saving is what makes this awkward to memorise. The US changes clocks three weeks before the EU in spring, and a week later in autumn. During those gaps, the New York open lands an hour earlier or later than usual in London terms. Traders who have internalised "the US opens at 2:30pm my time" are wrong for several weeks a year, twice a year.

The reliable approach is to work from the exchange's local hours and convert for the specific date, rather than memorising a fixed local equivalent. Japan and most Asian markets do not observe daylight saving at all, so those relationships only move when your own clock changes.

Key facts

NYSE

9:30am to 4:00pm Eastern Time.

LSE

8:00am to 4:30pm UK time.

Tokyo

9:00am to 3:00pm JST with a midday break; no daylight saving.

London–New York overlap

Roughly 2:30pm to 4:30pm UK, the busiest window of the day.

The open moves twice a year

US and EU clock changes are three weeks apart in spring.

Asian markets do not shift

Only your own clock change alters the relationship.

How to get it right

1

Note the exchange's local hours

Always start from the exchange's own time zone.

2

Convert for the specific date

Not for a season — the offset differs in transition weeks.

3

Mark the transition weekends

Late March, early November for the US; late March and October for the EU.

4

Set alerts in the exchange's zone

Calendar entries anchored to the exchange survive clock changes.

Questions people ask

Usually 2:30pm UK time, but for about three weeks in March and one in autumn it is 1:30pm, because the two regions change clocks on different dates.

Keep reading

Daylight saving explained

Which countries change their clocks, when they do it, and why the same two cities can be five hours apart one week and six the next.

UTC, GMT and Zulu time

What UTC actually is, how it differs from GMT, why aviation says Zulu, and when the distinction matters.

Scheduling across time zones

A practical method for booking meetings across zones: finding the overlap, rotating the pain, and stopping recurring calls from drifting.

Convert an exchange time

Pair pages give the standard-time and daylight-saving answers side by side.

Open the converters