PST to China

About Pacific Time

Pacific Time runs the length of the west coast, from British Columbia to the Mexican border. It sits at UTC−8 as PST for about four months of the year and at UTC−7 as PDT for the other eight, moving on the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November — dates set by US federal law that the Canadian Pacific provinces follow so the border stays on one clock.

Cities on this clock: Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, Seattle, Portland, Las Vegas, Vancouver.

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 Pacific 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 15 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 16 hours ahead of Pacific 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/Los_Angeles and Asia/Shanghai. Nothing is looked up on a server and nothing about your visit is recorded.