CST Time Now

CST right now

CST is Central Standard Time, six hours behind UTC and one hour behind the US East Coast. It is the clock in Chicago, Dallas and Houston through the winter months, from the first Sunday in November until the second Sunday in March.

This is the zone of the American middle: grain markets, Texas oil and gas, the Midwest’s manufacturing belt and a large share of the country’s call centres. When people say “Central” they usually mean it as a single time that covers both CST and the summer version CDT (UTC−5).

When this page was last built (Friday, November 6, 2026, 12:00 UTC) it was 6:00 AM on Friday in Central Standard Time. The offset for CST is UTC−6. The live clock above takes over as soon as the page loads and shows the exact current time.

Where CST is used

CST covers the central United States and Canada, and the Mexican interior, which uses it all year.

• Chicago
• Dallas
• Houston
• Austin
• San Antonio
• Minneapolis
• Milwaukee
• St. Louis
• New Orleans
• Oklahoma City
• Nashville
• Mexico City
• Guatemala City

Mexico abolished daylight saving in 2022, so Mexico City stays on CST all year. Saskatchewan does the same, and Regina is on UTC−6 permanently. Everywhere else the zone switches to CDT in the summer.

Working with Central Time

Chicago is the home of the CME Group, where futures on corn, wheat, interest rates and equity indexes trade on Central schedules. Equity index futures run almost around the clock, but the traditional grain session follows Central business hours, so a trader in Singapore or Mumbai needs the exact CST gap to know when the pit-era rhythm still matters.

For distributed teams, CST is a useful midpoint. It sits one hour behind New York and two hours ahead of Los Angeles, so a 10 AM CST meeting is 11 AM on the East Coast and 8 AM on the West Coast. That makes Central a common anchor for companies with offices on both coasts.

From Asia the picture is steep. India is 11 hours 30 minutes ahead of CST, and Japan is 15 hours ahead. A 9 AM CST start is 8:30 PM in India, which suits an evening handover but not a live meeting with Indian colleagues.

CST means three different things

In North America CST is Central Standard Time, UTC−6. In China CST is China Standard Time, UTC+8, which is a full 14 hours later. In Cuba, CST is Cuba Standard Time, UTC−5. A schedule that says “9 PM CST” without saying where the sender is can therefore mean three clock times that are up to 14 hours apart.

Inside the US, many people write CST all year when they mean Central Time. In summer the correct abbreviation is CDT. Calendar software normally resolves this from the named location, but a plain-text email that says “CST” in July is usually a loose use of the winter name.

Safe practice for international scheduling: write the offset, for example “15:00 UTC−6”, or name the city, such as “3 PM Chicago time”. Either removes the China and Cuba ambiguity completely.