Daylight saving time changes in Kansas, United States

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

Best Time to Call Kansas

Business hours in Kansas (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: 2:00 AM (next day) - 10:00 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 Kansas, United States

About Time in Kansas

Surrounded on Three Sides, and Still Holding Out

Cheyenne County sits in the far northwest corner of Kansas, bordering both Colorado and Nebraska, and by any reasonable geographic logic it should be on Mountain Time. Colorado to the west is Mountain Time. Western Nebraska to the north is Mountain Time. Yet Cheyenne County itself keeps Central Time, the same zone as Wichita and Kansas City hundreds of miles to the east.

The county switched from Mountain to Central Time around 1955, and the result today is a small pocket where crossing the county line north, south, or west means stepping into Mountain Time, while crossing east keeps you on Central. Only its eastern neighbor, Rawlins County, shares Cheyenne's stubborn allegiance to the clock used by the rest of the state.

Four Counties That Keep Voting to Stay Different

Four counties along Kansas's western edge, Sherman, Wallace, Greeley, and Hamilton, have kept Mountain Time for decades, and it is not for lack of asking whether they would rather switch. Residents there have been given the choice twice in recent history, in 1990 and again in 2002, and both times voted roughly 3 to 1 to keep Mountain Time rather than join the rest of Kansas on Central.

The reasoning is straightforward: these communities, covering roughly 6 percent of the state and home to about 11,000 people, do more of their daily business, shopping, and media consumption oriented toward Denver and Colorado than toward Topeka or Wichita. For them, matching Colorado's clock matters more than matching the rest of their own state's.

A Boundary That Has Moved Back and Forth for a Century

The line between Central and Mountain Time in Kansas has never stayed still. When railroads first drew time zone boundaries in 1883, the line ran roughly 125 miles east of where it sits today, and it has drifted, and in some cases reversed direction entirely, several times since.

In 1963 a handful of additional counties, including Cheyenne and Scott, were shifted to Mountain Time, only to be moved back to Central by 1974. Kearny County saw its own reversal in 1990, when the U.S. Department of Transportation moved its western half, including the county seat of Lakin, from Mountain back to Central Time after a series of community meetings in which residents argued their daily lives were oriented more toward eastern Kansas. The boundary that exists today, four counties on Mountain Time and the rest of the state on Central, is simply wherever a century of local petitions, votes, and federal decisions happened to leave it.

Frequently Asked Questions