Pacific time, explained
PDT. Pacific Daylight Time.
Pacific time is PDT right now — Pacific Daylight Time, UTC−7. It is 8:02 PM in Los Angeles.
Every sky you love, side by side.
Sol for iPhone is coming soon, with your places side by side under their own skies, each on its own clock.
Where you are
—
Your own clock, worked out when the page opens.
Sunrise
7:11 AM
10 h 52 min of daylight.
Sunset
6:03 PM
Golden hour from 5:29 PM.
The next change
1 Nov
PDT to PST: the clocks go back an hour. Sunset moves from 6:01 PM to 5:00 PM.
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. Pacific time covers California and Washington, most of Oregon and Nevada, and the north of Idaho. Most of British Columbia keeps the same clock under America/Vancouver until Sunday 1 November 2026; from then it stays at UTC−7 all year, the hour Pacific time keeps in summer and an hour ahead of it in winter. Arizona keeps one clock: America/Phoenix is on UTC−7 all year with no change at all.
The changes in 2026.
The light in Los Angeles now.
You stand at the middle of Los Angeles’s horizon. The dots are the sun’s path today. Walk the hours, or drag the sky to turn it.
How it knows.
The browser’s own tables
Every time here is read from the zone tables your browser carries, the IANA database by its zone id (America/Los_Angeles, not “Pacific”), never from an offset typed by hand. A zone’s name is what the tables say for the moment asked: PDT in a Pacific summer, PST in its winter.
Hours the clocks change
A clock change removes an hour in spring and repeats one in autumn. Both are reported rather than moved: an hour that does not exist is named, with the time the clock reads instead, and an hour that happens twice is given both ways.
The light beside the clock
An hour alone says nothing about the sky, so each clock stands beside its day’s light, worked out for the city from the sun’s position. The pages are rebuilt every night, and every time is worked out again in your browser when the page opens.
Convert it, or read another clock.
Los Angeles → Melbourneany hour, both dates Mountain time, explainedMST or MDT, and when Central time, explainedCST or CDT, and when Eastern time, explainedEST or EDT, and when UK time, explainedGMT or BST, and whenEvery place, its own light.
Sol for iPhone is coming soon, with your places side by side under their own skies, each on its own clock. Leave your address for early access and one email when it ships.
Explore the light
Play and learn
More from Sol