EST to China

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.

About China Standard Time

China runs a single clock, UTC+8, across roughly 60 degrees of longitude — the widest single-zone span of any country. In the far west that puts sunrise after 10:00 on the clock in midwinter. There is no daylight saving; the practice was dropped in 1991.

Cities on this clock: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Taipei, Hong Kong, Singapore.

Watch out: CST is also North American Central Standard Time (UTC−6). This page is the Chinese one — the two are fourteen hours apart.

How the difference is worked out

The gap between Eastern Time and China Standard Time is not one number. The two zones change their clocks on different dates, so for part of the year the difference is 12 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 — China Standard Time is 13 hours ahead of Eastern 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/New_York and Asia/Shanghai. Nothing is looked up on a server and nothing about your visit is recorded.