CST to UTC

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 Coordinated Universal Time

UTC never shifts. It is the reference every other zone is defined against, which is why logs, flight schedules and protocol timestamps use it. GMT is the same clock for every civil purpose, so a query for one is answered by the other.

Cities on this clock: Reykjavik, Accra, Abidjan, Dakar.

Watch out: GMT is also used loosely to mean "UK time", and those are not the same thing for seven months of the year — the United Kingdom moves to BST (UTC+1) while UTC stays put.

How the difference is worked out

The gap between Central Time and Coordinated Universal Time is not one number. The two zones change their clocks on different dates, so for part of the year the difference is 5 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 — Coordinated Universal Time is 6 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 UTC. Nothing is looked up on a server and nothing about your visit is recorded.