To find out what time zone you’re in, check your location against the time zone boundaries. That’s what the time zone finder does: use your location, search for a place or tap the map, and you get the time zone, the local time, the UTC offset, whether daylight saving time is on and when the clocks change next. Most of the time your phone gets it right, but in Arizona, in states split between two zones and near the lines, it pays to check. Here’s how, with the odd cases that trip people up.
Check any place in three steps
- Open the time zone finder.
- Press My location, type the name of a city or town, or tap anywhere on the map, even at sea.
- Read the time zone (for example, Central Daylight Time, America/Chicago), the local time, the UTC offset, whether daylight saving time is on, how far it is from your own time and the next clock changes.
To compare several places, like a meeting across offices, open the time difference calculator from the same page with Compare with another place.
The US time zones
Federal rules set nine standard time zones for the US and its territories: Atlantic, Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, Alaska, Hawaii-Aleutian, Samoa and Chamorro. The lower 48 use four: Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific, each one hour behind the one to its east.
Daylight saving time in 2026 and 2027
According to the NIST, daylight saving time starts at 2:00 a.m. local time on the second Sunday in March and ends at 2:00 a.m. on the first Sunday in November:
- In 2026 it runs from March 8 to November 1.
- On Sunday, November 1, 2026, clocks fall back from 2:00 to 1:00 a.m.
- On Sunday, March 14, 2027, they spring forward from 2:00 to 3:00 a.m.
It isn’t used in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands or most of Arizona. Arizona is the exception to the exception: the Navajo Nation, inside the state, does use it.
The odd cases we checked
We tapped these spots in the time zone finder on October 31, 2026:
| Place | Time zone | What’s odd |
|---|---|---|
| Phoenix, Arizona | Mountain Standard Time (America/Phoenix) | No daylight saving time: “clocks never change” |
| Window Rock, Arizona | Mountain Daylight Time (America/Denver) | The Navajo Nation uses daylight saving time, unlike the rest of Arizona |
| El Paso, Texas | Mountain Daylight Time (America/Denver) | Most of Texas is on Central Time |
| Pensacola, Florida | Central Daylight Time (America/Chicago) | Tallahassee, the state capital, is on Eastern Time |
| Gary, Indiana | Central Daylight Time (America/Chicago) | Indianapolis is on Eastern Time |
| Ontario, Oregon | Mountain Daylight Time (America/Boise) | Most of Oregon is on Pacific Time |
From November 1, the other five switch to standard time and Phoenix stays put, so for the winter Phoenix shares its time with Denver and El Paso again.
That’s why the state doesn’t tell you the time zone, and neither does the city in your mailing address: what counts is the exact spot.
Why your phone can get it wrong
Phones usually set the time zone automatically. Near a time zone line, though, one can end up showing the time of the other side, and in places that skip daylight saving time an app set to the wrong zone is an hour off all summer. If an appointment depends on it, check the spot on the map, or set the time zone by hand in your phone’s date and time settings.
Time zones on the map vs. the clock
In theory, a time zone is a band 15 degrees of longitude wide: the Earth turns 360 degrees in 24 hours. In practice, the lines follow state and county borders, so towns side by side can be an hour apart. Mapsfera draws them from timezone-boundary-builder, built on OpenStreetMap, and your browser works out the time with the IANA time zone database, the same one that keeps track of every daylight saving rule in the world.
To see all the US zones at once, open the US time zone map. And to find out which county a spot is in, which also decides its time zone in split states, see what county am I in?.