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Forex market hours

A clock that counts down instead of telling you what you already know. Every other session page shows a badge that says open or closed; the number you actually want is how long until the next thing happens, in the timezone you are sitting in.

Why a table of session times goes wrong twice a year

Almost every forex-hours page on the internet publishes one fixed table — London 08:00 to 17:00 GMT, New York 13:00 to 22:00 GMT — and then never touches it again. That table is correct for about five months of the year. The rest of the time it is an hour out, because London spends the summer on British Summer Time and New York spends most of the year on Eastern Daylight Time, and the two do not change on the same weekend.

For roughly three weeks each spring and one week each autumn, the United States has changed and Europe has not. During those windows the London–New York overlap is5 hours long instead of 4 — a 25% change in the length of the busiest window of the trading day. A static table cannot show you that, and neither can a clock that hardcodes offsets.

The clock above does none of that. Session hours are defined where they belong — in the local time of the city that keeps them — and converted through the browser's own IANA timezone database. When a government changes its daylight saving rules, the browser gets the update and this page is correct the day it ships, with no code change here at all.

The four sessions, in local time and in yours

Each session is defined by the hours its own financial centre keeps. The columns below show what those hours look like from a fixed reference, in the northern winter and the northern summer, so you can see exactly which of them move and by how much.

The overlap is the session that matters

London and New York are the two largest centres by a wide margin, and for a few hours a day they are open together. That window carries more volume than any other part of the 24-hour cycle — spreads are at their tightest, the largest scheduled US data releases land inside it, and the moves that define the day usually start there.

It is 4 hours long for most of the year and 5 hours during the weeks when the two continents are out of step on daylight saving. The clock above tracks the real length day by day rather than quoting a constant.

More volume is not the same as more opportunity. The overlap is where costs are lowest and movement is largest, which flatters breakout strategies and quietly destroys anything that needs a range to hold. Whether it suits you is a question about your own record, not about the market — and your statement already answers it.

Holidays, and the difference between quiet and closed

Spot forex does not close for a public holiday. The exchanges do, and that distinction matters more than most session pages admit. On “Good Friday” the euro still trades, thinly and badly; the JSE, the NYSE and the LSE are simply shut, so every index CFD priced off them stops moving. Half days are worse, because nothing announces them: the NYSE closes at 13:00 the day after Thanksgiving and on Christmas Eve, and a position left open into that close sits in a market that has already gone home.

The status badges above carry 67 holiday and half-day entries across the JSE, NYSE and LSE calendars, covering 2026 and 2027. Beyond that the clock still tells you the trading hours, and says plainly that it no longer knows about the holidays rather than implying a day is normal.

Keeping it open

The countdown mirrors itself into this tab's title, so the next session open is legible from a pinned tab you are not looking at. The favicon turns green while the market is open and grey while it is shut. There is a fullscreen mode for a spare monitor, and an opt-in browser notification with an optional tone when a session opens.

All four of those are entirely local. The notification is the browser's own, granted by you and revocable in your browser settings; the tone is generated in the page rather than downloaded; the timezone preference is stored in this browser and read by nothing else. No account, no server, no push service.

Every clock in the set

The same session component, the same data files and the same arithmetic, framed for whichever question you arrived with. A correction to a session time lands on all of them at once, because there is only one definition of it anywhere in the build.

By timezone

By session

By exchange

20 pages, one for each entity that a reader might actually search for. There is deliberately no page for every pair of them: a combinatorial converter would generate thousands of near-identical URLs, none of which answers a question the picker on this page does not already answer better.

Find your best session

Everything above this line is the same information every clock site has. This part is not: your MT4 or MT5 statement records the entry time of every trade you have ever taken, which is all it takes to answer the question the articles only guess at.

Drop the file on the analyzer and it tags each trade with the session it was opened in — using the real timezone of your broker's server, so a trade from March and one from August are each measured against the offset that was actually in force that day — then splits your win rate, expectancy and net P&L by session. Most traders find one session carrying the account and another quietly draining it.

Put this clock on your own site

The clock is free to embed, with no key, no account and no tracking. Paste this where you want it:

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