CST to SAST

About Central Time

Central Time covers the middle third of North America, from Manitoba down through Texas. It is UTC−6 as CST and UTC−5 as CDT, changing on the same dates as the other US zones — so the one-hour steps between Pacific, Mountain, Central and Eastern hold all year and never briefly collapse.

Cities on this clock: Chicago, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, Nashville, Minneapolis, New Orleans.

Watch out: CST is also the abbreviation for China Standard Time, which is UTC+8 — fourteen hours away from this one. This page is the North American zone.

About South Africa Standard Time

South Africa is a fixed UTC+2 and has never used daylight saving. Being in the southern hemisphere, its working day overlaps Europe most comfortably and North America least — and unlike its northern counterparts nothing about that changes through the year.

Cities on this clock: Johannesburg, Cape Town, Khartoum.

How the difference is worked out

The gap between Central Time and South Africa Standard Time is not one number. The two zones change their clocks on different dates, so for part of the year the difference is 7 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 — South Africa Standard Time is 8 hours ahead of Central 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 America/Chicago and Africa/Johannesburg. Nothing is looked up on a server and nothing about your visit is recorded.