Forex Market Hours

The trading week hangs on a local clock, not on UTC

Ask when the forex market opens and most pages answer with a UTC time. Some say 22:00 UTC on Sunday, some say 21:00, and neither is lying. The week does not open at a UTC time at all. It opens at 17:00 in New York, and New York sits four hours behind UTC from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November, and five hours behind for the rest of the year. So the answer is 21:00 UTC for roughly eight months of the year and 22:00 UTC for the other four, from one sentence that never changed.

That is why this page never prints a bare UTC timetable as the answer. Every figure here is built from the local clock and then converted, for the date you pick, with each zone's daylight saving state worked out for that day. The local column is the fixed one and the UTC column is the one that moves — the opposite of how a printed table has to work, and the reason a printed table is wrong for part of the year.

The close is the same anchor on the other end: 17:00 in New York on Friday. Sunday 17:00 to Friday 17:00 is five days, and no clock change falls inside that stretch, because the switches happen at 02:00 on a Sunday morning, hours before the week opens. The weekly window is 120 hours long every week of the year.

Four sessions, four local clocks

Within the week, the day is handed between four financial centres, and each one runs on its own business hours: Sydney 09:00 to 18:00, Tokyo 09:00 to 18:00, London 08:00 to 17:00, New York 08:00 to 17:00. Those are local times, and they are the thing that stays still. What moves is everything derived from them.

Sydney is the least settled of the four and it is worth saying so. Australia's own daylight saving runs the opposite way to Europe's and America's, and references disagree by an hour about where the Sydney session starts. It is also the thinnest of the four, so the practical answer for most traders is the one your platform's server clock gives you rather than the one a table gives you. If the two disagree, the server wins.

What genuinely matters about the handover is not the clock times but the liquidity behind them. Quotes keep arriving across the whole week because there is no single venue to shut; the volume behind those quotes rises and falls as each centre opens and closes. A currency pair can be quoted at 03:00 UTC and be almost untradeable at the size you want, and it can be quoted at 13:00 UTC in the middle of two overlapping sessions and absorb the same order without moving. The hours tell you when the market exists; they do not tell you how much market there is.

The third clock: your broker's server

Three clocks are in play on every trade and people routinely mix them up. There is your wall clock, there is the local clock the session is anchored to, and there is your broker's server clock — and the third one is the one your charts are drawn in.

That matters more than it sounds. A daily candle closes when the server's clock passes midnight, so the day on your chart starts and ends at a moment that has nothing to do with your evening and nothing to do with UTC. The rollover — the point where a position held overnight is settled and the swap is charged — is conventionally 17:00 New York time, which is yet another clock again. Two different moments, two different clocks, both stamped on the same chart.

Servers are commonly set to a European or Eastern European offset, and some of them follow daylight saving while others do not, which is why the offset is a field on this page rather than a guess. Find it by comparing the time your terminal shows with a time you know in UTC, or look in the platform's own settings. Then the fourth column in the session table above reads the same session off the clock you actually trade from.

Overlaps move too — and not only their clock times, their length

The London and New York overlap is the busiest window of the day, and for most of the year it is four hours long. For two stretches of the year it is five. Europe moves to summer time on the last Sunday in March; the United States moves on the second Sunday in March. Between those two dates London is still on GMT and New York is already an hour forward, so the two sessions sit an hour closer together on the UTC clock and the overlap widens by an hour. The same thing happens in reverse in the autumn: Europe goes back on the last Sunday of October, the United States on the first Sunday of November, and for that week the overlap is five hours again.

Everywhere else, both sides move together and the four-hour overlap survives intact — which is exactly why the exception is easy to miss. If you have a rule that keys off a fixed UTC window for the overlap, it is an hour out of shape for about four weeks a year, and it is out of shape in the direction that makes you late.

Two overlaps change length for a different reason: one side moves and the other does not. Tokyo's UTC window is identical in January and July because Japan has no daylight saving, so when London slides an hour earlier in UTC it slides an hour deeper into Tokyo's day — the Tokyo and London overlap is one hour in January and two in July. Sydney moves in the opposite direction to London, so the Sydney and Tokyo overlap runs the other way: seven hours in January, eight in July. The windows are not fixed lengths that slide. They change size.

Weekends and holidays: is the market open on Labor Day?

From Friday 17:00 New York to Sunday 17:00 New York there is no trading week to send an order into. That is what "closed" means here — not that the price stopped existing, but that the settlement day underneath it has not started. A platform may still show a quote on a Saturday; that quote is the platform's, not the market's.

Holidays work differently, and the honest answer has two halves. A national holiday closes that country's banks, and the banks are the market — so on Labor Day in the United States the dollar side of most pairs is thin. Quotes still arrive, because there is no single venue to shut, but the volume behind them is a fraction of a normal day and price can travel through levels with nothing in between to fill an order. A holiday is not a day the market closes; it is a day the market gets shallow.

The second half is that not every symbol follows the currency calendar. Index and metal CFDs are priced off exchanges that have their own opening times and their own holiday calendars, and on a day when currencies are thin those symbols may not be quoted at all. That is in the symbol specification on your platform, not on this page. Whether your broker quotes at all on a given holiday is also its own setting — check its trading hours for the symbol you are trading.

Some of them can be worked out from a date, and the third tool above flags those. Memorial Day is the last Monday of May and Labor Day the first Monday of September; Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday of November. Christmas Day, New Year's Day, Juneteenth and Independence Day are fixed dates. When one of them falls at a weekend the observance usually moves to a neighbouring weekday, which is not the same as the market being open on it.

The rest cannot be derived from a rule this page can state — the moveable holidays around Easter, and every holiday outside the United States — so it does not guess at them. Only American holidays are flagged, because the dollar is on one side of most traded pairs and that is the calendar that moves the market most. For any other country, the same reasoning applies to its own banking calendar.

What this page does not assume

No server time, and no assumption about whether a server follows daylight saving — both are fields. No holiday calendar of any broker, and no statement about whether any particular broker quotes on any particular day: that is a setting of that firm, and reading it takes one look at its symbol specification.

The four session windows are stated as the conventional local business hours of each centre, and they are conventions rather than exchange rules — forex has no opening bell. Sydney's is the one where references disagree, and it is flagged as such above.

And no view on which session is the best one to trade, or which hours suit which strategy. The hours are arithmetic; what you do inside them is not, and a clock is not a trading plan.

Frequently asked questions

What are the forex market hours?

Twenty-four hours a day, five days a week. The week opens at 17:00 New York time on Sunday and closes at 17:00 New York time on Friday, which is 120 hours. Within it the day moves between four sessions: Sydney 09:00 to 18:00, Tokyo 09:00 to 18:00, London 08:00 to 17:00 and New York 08:00 to 17:00, each in its own local time. The first tool on this page converts all of it onto your own clock.

What time does the forex market open?

17:00 New York time on Sunday. In UTC that is 21:00 from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November, and 22:00 for the rest of the year — which is why a single printed UTC time is right for only part of the year. The third tool above works out what the Sunday open is on your clock for any week you pick.

What time does the forex market open on Monday?

It is already open. The trading week starts on Sunday evening New York time, so by Monday morning anywhere in the world the market has been running for hours. Monday 00:00 in your time zone falls inside the Sydney and Tokyo sessions, not at the start of anything. If you meant the Monday session in a particular centre, that centre opens at its own local hour — 08:00 in London, for example.

When does the forex market close on Friday?

17:00 New York time. That is 21:00 UTC while New York is on daylight saving and 22:00 UTC when it is not. Positions held through that moment are carried over the weekend, and the settlement and any overnight financing happen around the same point, which is why the weekend gap is a risk of its own rather than a pause.

Is the forex market open on Saturday?

No. The weekly window runs from Sunday 17:00 to Friday 17:00 New York time, so Saturday sits outside it. A quote you see on a Saturday is your platform's own pricing, not an interbank market you can trade into.

Is the forex market open on Sunday?

For part of it. It opens at 17:00 New York time on Sunday, which is 21:00 or 22:00 UTC depending on the time of year. Before that moment the new week has not started. The first tool above tells you whether it is open right now and counts down to the open if it is not.

Is the forex market open on Labor Day?

Labor Day in the United States is the first Monday of September, and on it the American banks that make up one side of most dollar pairs are shut. Currency quotes keep arriving because there is no single venue to close, but the volume behind them drops sharply and gaps through levels become more likely. Index and metal CFDs follow an exchange calendar instead and may not be quoted at all. The third tool above flags the date when you pick it.

Is the forex market closed on Labor Day?

Not in the way it is closed on a Saturday. The weekly window is open; what is missing is the liquidity inside it. That distinction matters, because a thin market behaves like a fast one: the same order moves the price further, and a stop can fill well past the level it was set at.

What are the forex session times?

Sydney 09:00 to 18:00, Tokyo 09:00 to 18:00, London 08:00 to 17:00, New York 08:00 to 17:00 — each on its own local clock. The second tool on this page takes a date and your UTC offset and prints all four on your clock, in server time and in UTC, along with the three overlaps between them.

What time does the forex market open in India?

India is UTC+5:30, so the weekly open at 17:00 New York time lands at 02:30 on Monday morning Indian time while New York is on daylight saving, and 03:30 for the rest of the year. London's 08:00 open is 12:30 or 13:30 Indian time, and the London and New York overlap runs from 17:30 to 21:30 or from 18:30 to 22:30. Put 5.5 into the offset field above and every window on the page moves onto Indian time.

Does daylight saving change the forex market hours?

It changes every clock except the local one. London's session is 08:00 to 17:00 London time in January and in July; what changes is which UTC hours that corresponds to. Because Europe and the United States switch on different dates, the overlaps change as well — the London and New York overlap is four hours for most of the year and five hours during the weeks when only one side has moved.

What is broker server time, and why does my chart not match my clock?

Server time is the offset your broker's platform stamps its data with, and your charts are drawn in it. A daily candle closes when the server's clock passes midnight, so the "day" on your chart can start at any hour of your own day. Many servers run a European offset and some follow daylight saving while others do not. Enter the offset in the field above to see the same sessions on the clock you are actually reading.

Is the forex market open 24 hours a day?

Through the trading week, yes — quotes move continuously from the Sunday open to the Friday close, with the day handed between four centres. It is not 24 hours on Saturday. And "open" describes the quotes, not the depth: at 03:00 UTC the market is open and thin, and the spread and the slippage you get are a different market from the one at 13:00 UTC when two sessions overlap.

Is the forex market open right now?

The first tool on this page answers it from the clock in your browser and keeps the countdown running. It checks the current instant against the weekly window and tells you which of the four sessions is running, what the next change is, and when it lands on your clock.

Do I need my broker's own market hours page instead?

For the hours of a specific symbol on a specific account, yes — a broker's page knows that firm's own server clock, its holiday calendar and whether it quotes each symbol through a given holiday, and none of those are things this page can see. Use theirs for that.

What this page adds is the conversion, which is where most of the confusion actually lives: the same session on your clock, on the server clock and in UTC at once, plus the overlaps and the two stretches a year when they change length. Those are the parts a table of fixed hours does not give you, and they are the parts that make a fixed table wrong.

Once you know which session you are trading in, the size of the trade is the next question. The lot size calculator works it out from your stop, and the forex stop loss calculator measures the stop from your entry and stop prices — which is also where weekend gaps show up, because a stop is an order that fills where it can. If the deposit is the part you are checking, the forex margin calculator measures how far price can travel before the platform closes the position for you.