EST to PST time converter

How far apart are New York and Los Angeles?

Los Angeles is 3 hours behind New York all year, whether New York is on EST and Los Angeles on PST, or New York is on EDT and Los Angeles on PDT. Both cities change their clocks on the same dates, so the gap never moves for more than a few hours at a time — see below.

2026

Briefly, it is different again: for 3 h from 3:00am New York time on Sunday, 8 March 2026, the gap is 4 h — New York has changed its clocks and Los Angeles has not yet ; for 3 h from 1:00am New York time on Sunday, 1 November 2026, the gap is 2 h — New York has changed its clocks and Los Angeles has not yet .

2027

Briefly, it is different again: for 3 h from 3:00am New York time on Sunday, 14 March 2027, the gap is 4 h — New York has changed its clocks and Los Angeles has not yet ; for 3 h from 1:00am New York time on Sunday, 7 November 2027, the gap is 2 h — New York has changed its clocks and Los Angeles has not yet .

EST to PST hour table

Every hour of a New York day, read across to Los Angeles . A row marked +1 day is already tomorrow there; −1 day is still yesterday.

The clock names under each heading are the ones in force at either end of the year. For a half-hour time or a third city, use the timeline above: every clock moves to the instant you pick.

Working across New York and Los Angeles

New York and Los Angeles are three hours apart, and unlike most pairs on this site the number does not move with the seasons: both coasts change their clocks on the same two Sundays — forward on the second Sunday in March, back on the first Sunday in November — so Eastern and Pacific time shift together and the gap stays at three hours whether the letters say EST and PST or EDT and PDT. That makes this the easy conversion. It is on this site anyway because of the two hours a year when it is not.

Daylight saving changes happen at 2am local time, and 2am in New York is three hours before 2am in Los Angeles. On the March Sunday, New York's clocks jump forward at 2am Eastern while Los Angeles has not moved yet, and for the next three hours the two cities are four hours apart; then Los Angeles jumps and the gap is back to three. In November the same three-hour window runs the other way and the gap is two. This affects almost nobody's meetings, but it is real, it is exactly the kind of thing a system that stores times as "Eastern minus three" gets wrong, and the tool above shows it: the difference row reads +4h or +2h for those hours.

The working-day overlap is generous and lopsided. Nine to five in New York is six to two in Los Angeles, so a Pacific-time team's morning is an Eastern team's afternoon and the usable shared window is roughly noon to 5pm Eastern, 9am to 2pm Pacific. The customary complaint is that East Coast colleagues schedule 9am meetings, which are 6am in California; the tool's daylight bands show that hour still in the dawn colour on the Pacific band, which is a more persuasive argument than saying so.

The two zones in between follow the same rule. Central time is one hour behind Eastern and Mountain time is two, and both change on the same dates, so Chicago, Dallas, Denver and Salt Lake City slot into the hour table at fixed offsets. The exception is Arizona: most of the state does not observe daylight saving and stays on Mountain Standard Time, UTC−7, all year — which puts Phoenix on the same clock as Los Angeles for eight months and an hour ahead of it for four. Add Phoenix in the tool to see its band stay put while the others move.

Because the difference is small the date changes only late in the evening — from 9pm Pacific it is already tomorrow in New York — but "midnight Eastern" as a release time is 9pm in California, and "end of day Pacific" reaches New York at 8pm or later. If the time you are holding is a Unix timestamp, it has no time zone of its own; decode it in the epoch converter first and then read it here.

Sources

The offsets, dates and hour tables above are computed when this page is built, from the time zone rules your browser itself ships. The rules come from:

• IANA Time Zone Database — the rules every browser ships
• NIST — Daylight Saving Time rules (United States)
• ECMA-402 — the Intl.DateTimeFormat standard these figures are computed with