Central Standard Time is UTC−06:00. It is the winter offset for Chicago, Houston, Mexico City, and much of the central United States.
Detecting your timezone for a personal comparison…
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CST can also mean China Standard Time (UTC+08:00). This page follows the North American meaning, using America/Chicago, because that is the usual intent for English-language queries about CST alongside EST and PST. China Standard Time is covered on the Shanghai city page and the China country page. Central Time switches to CDT (UTC−05:00) where daylight saving is observed.
The offset shown above is computed from America/Chicago at page render time using Intl.DateTimeFormat. It can change when daylight saving starts or ends.
Most US Central locations observe daylight saving and use CDT in summer. Saskatchewan and some Mexican regions follow different rules via other IANA zones.
Central Standard Time (CST) uses the IANA identifier America/Chicago. Central Standard Time is UTC−06:00. It is the winter offset for Chicago, Houston, Mexico City, and much of the central United States.
Right now Central Standard Time is UTC-05:00. The live abbreviation reported by the timezone database is CDT.
Daylight saving time is in effect. Standard time is labeled CST and daylight time is labeled CDT. Dates are taken from IANA data, not hardcoded on this site.
Use the converter with America/Chicago as the source zone, or open the Time Zone Converter and pick a city that uses CST. Offsets update automatically when daylight saving begins or ends.