CET to EST

About Central European Time

Central European Time covers most of the continent, from Spain to Poland, at UTC+1 as CET and UTC+2 as CEST. Every EU country changes at the same instant — 01:00 UTC on the last Sunday of March and of October — rather than at 02:00 local like North America, so the whole bloc moves together and the steps between European zones never wobble.

Cities on this clock: Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Rome, Amsterdam, Brussels, Vienna, Warsaw.

About Eastern Time

Eastern Time is the most populous North American zone and the one most business hours are quoted in. It is UTC−5 as EST and UTC−4 as EDT. Because it changes on US dates rather than European ones, its gap to London and to Central Europe is not constant — there are two short stretches each year when it is an hour narrower than usual, and they are the reason this pair's table has more than one row.

Cities on this clock: New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, Atlanta, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa.

How the difference is worked out

The gap between Central European Time and Eastern Time is not one number. The two zones change their clocks on different dates, so for part of the year the difference is 6 hours and for the rest it is something else — the table above lists each stretch of 2026 with the date it starts and which country's clocks moved.

With both zones on their own standard time — daylight saving not in force anywhere — Eastern Time is 6 hours behind Central European Time. That figure never changes; everything else on this page follows from it plus whichever clocks have moved.

Every figure here comes from the IANA time zone database via your browser's own Intl engine, using the zone ids Europe/Paris and America/New_York. Nothing is looked up on a server and nothing about your visit is recorded.