PST to CST

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 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.

How the difference is worked out

Neither Pacific Time nor Central Time moves its clock relative to the other, so central time is 2 hours ahead of pacific time is a rule rather than a fact about one particular year. The hour-by-hour table above holds on every date. The one exception is a few hours on each transition day: the two zones do change their clocks, and not at the same instant, so the gap is briefly an hour off between one switching and the other.

With both zones on their own standard time — daylight saving not in force anywhere — Central Time is 2 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 America/Chicago. Nothing is looked up on a server and nothing about your visit is recorded.