Daylight saving time changes in Arkansas, United States

Arkansas uses the IANA time zone identifier America/Chicago. The current local offset is UTC-5 / CDT.

Best Time to Call Arkansas

Business hours in Arkansas (9 AM-5 PM local time) fall at these local times elsewhere:

• Sao Paulo: 11:00 AM - 7:00 PM ( Convenient)
• Frankfurt: 4:00 PM - 12:00 AM (next day) ( Partial overlap)
• Johannesburg: 4:00 PM - 12:00 AM (next day) ( Partial overlap)
• Singapore: 10:00 PM - 6:00 AM (next day) ( Outside normal hours)
• Hong Kong: 10:00 PM - 6:00 AM (next day) ( Outside normal hours)
• Istanbul: 5:00 PM - 1:00 AM (next day) ( Partial overlap)
• Auckland: 3:00 AM (next day) - 11:00 AM (next day) ( Outside normal hours)

Times shown reflect current UTC offsets and may shift by up to an hour around daylight saving transitions.

Current Time in Cities of Arkansas, United States

About Time in Arkansas

A State That Keeps Trying to Change the Clock, and Keeps Failing

Arkansas has not managed to pass a single bill altering how it handles Daylight Saving Time, despite lawmakers trying repeatedly and from opposite directions. In 2019, a bill filed as HB1368 sought to move Arkansas permanently to standard time, but the bill was later withdrawn by its own author before a vote.

Two years later, HB1017 attempted the opposite, permanent Daylight Saving Time year round, and died in a Senate committee in October 2021. In December 2022, Representative Johnny Rye of Trumann tried again, proposing that Arkansas adopt Daylight Saving Time as standard time whenever Congress allows states to do so, a bill that also failed to become law. Most recently, HB1069 in 2025 took yet another angle, seeking to exempt Arkansas entirely from the federal Uniform Time Act the way Hawaii and most of Arizona already have, and it too fell short.

Four separate attempts, three different approaches, spanning consecutive legislative sessions, and Arkansas clocks still spring forward and fall back exactly as they did before any of the bills were introduced.

A State That Nearly Spans the Full Width of Its Own Time Zone

According to official state boundary data from the Arkansas GIS Office, the state stretches from about 89.62 degrees west longitude at its eastern edge to about 94.62 degrees west at its western edge, a span of exactly 5 degrees of longitude.

The Central Time Zone is anchored to the 90th meridian west, which runs almost exactly along Arkansas's eastern boundary. That means clock noon in far eastern Arkansas nearly matches true solar noon, while in the far west of the state, communities sitting close to the Oklahoma border experience solar noon roughly 18 minutes after the clock already says twelve, since they sit about 4.6 degrees west of the meridian the whole zone is built around.

Arkansas is narrow enough that this gap never justifies a second time zone, unlike wider states such as Texas or Tennessee, but it is wide enough that the sun over Fort Smith and the sun over Memphis are keeping noticeably different schedules while both read the same time on every clock.

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