One day across the page, midnight to midnight in Los Angeles. The band is that city's own sky; the bracket is nine to five in its own clock; the line is now.
The zone, its names and its changes from the IANA tables the browser carries (America/Los_Angeles) · refreshed nightly · 2026-09-15 02:14 UTC.
PST and PDT are two clocks, an hour apart
“Pacific time” is a place's clock, not a fixed offset. From the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November it is Pacific Daylight Time, UTC−7; the rest of the year it is Pacific Standard Time, UTC−8. Writing PST in July, or reading a PST meeting as a PDT one, moves it by an hour — which is why this page never writes one for the other, and why every Sol page names the zone as the tables have it for the instant in question.
The zone id is America/Los_Angeles. It covers California, most of Nevada, and parts of Oregon and Idaho; British Columbia keeps the same clock under America/Vancouver, and Arizona does not — it is America/Phoenix, on UTC−7 all year with no change at all.
The changes in 2026
| Date | The clock | The name |
|---|---|---|
| 8 March 2026 | 1:59 AM → 3:00 AM | PST → PDT |
| 1 November 2026 | 1:59 AM → 1:00 AM | PDT → PST |
How it knows
Every time here is read from the zone tables the browser itself carries — the IANA database by its zone id (America/Los_Angeles, not "Pacific"), through the browser's own Intl — never from an offset typed in by hand. A zone's name is what those tables say for the instant asked: PDT in a Pacific summer, PST in its winter, BST or GMT in London, AEDT or AEST in Melbourne; the page never writes one for the other, and "Pacific time" is expanded to whichever is in force on the date in question.
A clock change makes two kinds of trouble for a converted time, and both are reported rather than moved: an hour the spring-forward removes (2:30 AM on the day the clocks jump from 2:00 to 3:00 does not exist — the page says so and names where the clock landed), and an hour the fall-back repeats (1:30 AM happens twice; the page gives both, the first in daylight time and the second in standard). Dates are explicit in both places, because a converted evening is often tomorrow morning on the other side.
The pair pages find the year's changes in either zone and give the difference after each; the city pages show the day's light beside the clock, because the hour alone says nothing about the sky. The nightly bake fixes the zone facts and the year's dates; the clocks themselves run in your browser.
Make time for the light. Sol for iPhone is coming soon.
Sol for iPhone · Coming soon