PST to CST Converter (and CST to PST)

About this tool

This converter turns Pacific Time into Central Time and Central back into Pacific, for any date you choose. It opens at 11:00 AM Pacific today, labels each side with the season's abbreviation (PST or PDT, CST or CDT), and keeps a live clock for both zones. Below it are a printable 24-hour chart, the exact nights in 2026 and 2027 when the gap briefly changes, and a table of the office hours the two zones share.

How to use it

1. Set the direction. Pacific to Central is the default; pick Central to Pacific if your starting time is in Chicago, Dallas or Houston.
2. Enter the date and the time on the clock you are starting from. The field labels change to show which zone they expect.
3. Read the answer. The large line is the converted time; the line under it gives both full zone names, both UTC offsets, and how many hours apart the zones are on that date.
4. Swap direction keeps the same moment and flips the sides, which is a quick way to check a reply. Copy result copies both lines for an email or invite.

The rule: two hours

Pacific Standard Time is UTC-08:00 and Central Standard Time is UTC-06:00. In summer each moves forward one hour, to PDT (UTC-07:00) and CDT (UTC-05:00). Both zones follow the federal schedule in 15 U.S.C. 260a: clocks go forward at 2:00 a.m. on the second Sunday of March and back at 2:00 a.m. on the first Sunday of November, local time. Since the two zones move together, Central is 2 hours ahead of Pacific in every season, and the chart needs only one column.

Changeover nights

"Local time" is the catch. Chicago reaches 2:00 a.m. two hours before Los Angeles does, so on each changeover night there is a two-hour stretch when one zone has switched and the other has not. On Sun Mar 8, 2026, from 12:00 AM to 1:59 AM PST (that is 3:00 AM to 4:59 AM CDT in Chicago), Central is already on daylight time and the gap is 3 hours. On Sun Nov 1, 2026, from 12:00 AM to 1:59 AM PDT, Central has fallen back first and the gap drops to 1 hour. The same thing happens on Sun Mar 14, 2027 and Sun Nov 7, 2027. It matters for overnight shifts, batch jobs and flights, not for daytime meetings, and the converter applies it whenever you enter one of those times.

Worked example: 11 AM Pacific

The default input is 11:00 AM Pacific. On a summer date the result reads 11:00 AM PDT = 1:00 PM CDT, followed by the offsets UTC-07:00 and UTC-05:00 and the note that Central Time is 2 hours ahead of Pacific Time on this date. On a winter date it reads 11:00 AM PST = 1:00 PM CST, with UTC-08:00 and UTC-06:00. Swap the direction and 1:00 PM Central comes back as 11:00 AM Pacific.

Why West and Central schedules collide

Pacific and Central are not the pair most people think of first; calendars and broadcasts usually anchor on Eastern Time. Yet plenty of work runs directly between the two: a Seattle or San Diego team with a client in Chicago, Minneapolis or Kansas City; a California business shipping from a warehouse in Dallas or Houston, where the daily pickup cutoff is set on Central clocks; a recruiter in Los Angeles interviewing candidates in Texas or Oklahoma; families split between the West Coast and the Midwest. Most of Texas is on Central Time, but the far west around El Paso uses Mountain Time, only 1 hour ahead of the West Coast, so check the city before you assume.

A full 9-to-5 day overlaps for 6 hours: 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM Pacific is 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM Central. A Central team that starts at 8:00 AM, which is 6:00 AM Pacific, works three hours before a 9:00 AM Pacific start, while West Coast staff finishing at 5:00 PM have their last two hours after Chicago has gone home. If an East Coast office joins the call, the three-way window narrows to 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM Pacific.

Common mistakes

• Adding three hours out of habit from PST to EST conversions. Central is two hours ahead, not three.
• Writing "CST" in July. Between March and November Central is on CDT; "CT" is safer, and it does not clash with China Standard Time.
• Forgetting the date: 10:00 PM Pacific is midnight in Chicago, the next day, and a 1:00 AM Central deadline is still 11:00 PM the night before in California.
• Storing a fixed UTC-8 or UTC-6 in a spreadsheet. Save the zone names America/Los_Angeles and America/Chicago instead.

Related converters

For the coast-to-coast pair, use PST to EST; for Chicago and New York, CST to EST; for the Rockies and Arizona, MST to EST. To line up three or more places at once, the Time Zone Converter has a meeting planner that shades working hours in each zone.