UTC to EST
Eastern Time is five hours behind UTC in winter (EST, UTC−5) and four hours behind in summer (EDT, UTC−4): 15:00 UTC is 10:00 AM in New York in January and 11:00 AM in July. UTC itself never changes, so the shift happens entirely on the New York side.
Convert the other way: EST → UTC
Reading UTC timestamps from New York
Server logs, cloud dashboards, flight plans and weather reports are written in UTC. An ISO 8601 time like 2026-07-14T02:30:00Z, where the trailing Z ("Zulu") means UTC, is 10:30 PM on July 13 in New York, the previous evening. Any UTC time before 05:00 in winter, or before 04:00 in summer, falls on the previous calendar day on the East Coast.
That date rollover is the most common source of mistakes when someone in New York reads a log or a release note. If an alert fired at 01:12 UTC on a Tuesday, the on-call engineer in New York saw it on Monday evening at 8:12 PM (in summer, 9:12 PM).
UTC to EST conversion table
Every hour of the day, using today's offsets (daylight saving is applied automatically).
| UTC | EST |
|---|---|
| 12:00 AM | 8:00 PM−1 |
| 1:00 AM | 9:00 PM−1 |
| 2:00 AM | 10:00 PM−1 |
| 3:00 AM | 11:00 PM−1 |
| 4:00 AM | 12:00 AM |
| 5:00 AM | 1:00 AM |
| 6:00 AM | 2:00 AM |
| 7:00 AM | 3:00 AM |
| 8:00 AM | 4:00 AM |
| 9:00 AM | 5:00 AM |
| 10:00 AM | 6:00 AM |
| 11:00 AM | 7:00 AM |
| UTC | EST |
|---|---|
| 12:00 PM | 8:00 AM |
| 1:00 PM | 9:00 AM |
| 2:00 PM | 10:00 AM |
| 3:00 PM | 11:00 AM |
| 4:00 PM | 12:00 PM |
| 5:00 PM | 1:00 PM |
| 6:00 PM | 2:00 PM |
| 7:00 PM | 3:00 PM |
| 8:00 PM | 4:00 PM |
| 9:00 PM | 5:00 PM |
| 10:00 PM | 6:00 PM |
| 11:00 PM | 7:00 PM |
Working hours that overlap (9:00–17:00 on both sides)
UTC 10 PM–2 AM
Daylight saving time
- Coordinated Universal TimeUTC
No daylight saving; all year UTC+0
Worldwide reference
- Eastern TimeEST / EDT
UTC−5 in winter, UTC−4 in summer
US East Coast
Why the offset changes in March and November
UTC is a fixed scale kept by atomic clocks and has no daylight saving. New York moves to UTC−4 at 2:00 AM local time on the second Sunday of March (07:00 UTC) and back to UTC−5 on the first Sunday of November (06:00 UTC). A job scheduled for 13:00 UTC therefore runs at 8:00 AM Eastern in winter and 9:00 AM in summer.
If you are going the other way, from a New York meeting time to a UTC deadline or cron entry, EST to UTC shows the opposite conversion and the scheduling pitfalls that come with it.
Other conversions with these zones
Frequently asked questions
- What time is 00:00 UTC in New York?
- Midnight UTC is 7:00 PM Eastern the previous day in winter and 8:00 PM the previous day in summer.
- What does the Z at the end of a timestamp mean?
- Z stands for "Zulu", the military and aviation name for UTC. A timestamp ending in Z has no offset and must be converted to local time.
- Is EST always UTC−5?
- EST itself is always UTC−5, but New York only uses EST from November to March. In summer it uses EDT, UTC−4.
- How do I convert UTC to Eastern by hand?
- Subtract five hours between the first Sunday of November and the second Sunday of March, and four hours the rest of the year. If the result is negative, add 24 and go back one day.
- Does UTC ever add or remove time?
- Occasionally a leap second has been added to keep UTC close to Earth's rotation, but international timekeepers decided in 2022 to stop doing so by 2035. Leap seconds never affect the hour difference.