UTC to PST Converter (and PST to UTC)

About this tool

Paste in a UTC time and get California time, or go the other way and turn a Pacific time into UTC. The converter opens at 17:00 UTC (5:00 PM) on today's date and works out for that date whether Los Angeles is on Pacific Standard Time or Pacific Daylight Time. Two live clocks show UTC and Pacific time right now, and the printable chart below covers all 24 hours for both seasons.

Using the converter

1. Pick UTC to Pacific or Pacific to UTC in the Direction menu.
2. Fill in the date and time. The field labels change to show which zone you are typing in.
3. Check the result line, which includes PST or PDT, and the detail line, which spells out both offsets and how many hours apart they are on that day.
4. Copy result copies both lines for a ticket, a runbook or a chat message.

8 hours in winter, 7 hours in summer

UTC is fixed. Pacific Standard Time is UTC-08:00, and from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November the West Coast is on Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00 (NIST). The switch happens at 2:00 AM local time, which is 10:00 UTC in spring and 09:00 UTC in autumn. For 2026 that means PDT starts at 10:00 UTC on March 8 and ends at 09:00 UTC on November 1; in 2027 it runs from 10:00 UTC on March 14 to 09:00 UTC on November 7.

Because the gap is large, the date often changes. Midnight UTC is 4:00 PM PST or 5:00 PM PDT on the previous day. Anything scheduled for midnight UTC, such as a daily quota reset or a nightly build, happens during the California afternoon.

Worked example: 17:00 UTC

On load the tool converts 5:00 PM UTC on the current date. Between March and November it reads 5:00 PM UTC = 10:00 AM PDT, with the detail that Pacific Time is 7 hours behind UTC on this date (UTC-07:00). In winter it reads 5:00 PM UTC = 9:00 AM PST and an 8-hour gap. Choose Pacific to UTC, enter 10:00 AM on a July date, and you get 5:00 PM UTC back.

A trap in fixed-offset zone names

Some systems offer fixed zones such as Etc/GMT+8. In the IANA tz database the sign of these names is inverted, following the POSIX convention: Etc/GMT+8 means 8 hours behind UTC, the same as PST, and it never switches to daylight time. Setting a server or a scheduled job to it gives correct Pacific times only in winter. To follow California clocks all year, use America/Los_Angeles, which is the zone this converter uses.

Reading UTC timestamps

Timestamps such as 2026-07-15T17:00:00Z end in Z to mark UTC. To convert one, read the date and the time after the T, then subtract 7 or 8 hours depending on the season. A Unix epoch number has no zone at all; convert it with the Timestamp Converter first, then bring the UTC result here. When you need the length of an outage or a job, the Time Duration Calculator handles the subtraction.

Common mistakes

• Subtracting 8 hours in July. During daylight time the correct figure is 7.
• Missing the date change: 03:00 UTC on Friday is Thursday evening in Los Angeles.
• Reading a fixed -08:00 offset in a log line as "Pacific time". It is PST specifically, not PDT.
• Forgetting that UTC itself never springs forward, so only the Pacific side of the calculation changes in March and November.

Use cases

West Coast engineers reading production logs, cloud maintenance notices and incident timelines written in UTC; turning a UTC launch time into a local start for a team in San Francisco or Seattle; scheduling cron jobs on a UTC server so they fire during California working hours. For the East Coast use UTC to EST, for the coast-to-coast gap use PST to EST, and for several zones at once open the Time Zone Converter.