Daylight saving time changes in Nebraska, United States

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

Best Time to Call Nebraska

Business hours in Nebraska (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 Nebraska, United States

About Time in Nebraska

The County Split in Half by Its Own Clock

Cherry County, the largest county in Nebraska by land area, does not fit neatly into either of the state's two time zones, it sits astride both. The legal boundary between Central and Mountain Time runs straight through the county itself, with roughly 35 percent of its land, measured from the eastern county line, falling on the Central side while the rest keeps Mountain Time.

Nebraska as a whole has carried this kind of split since the railroads first divided the continent into four zones in 1883, placing most of the state in Central Time while the western reaches, closer to the Rocky Mountains, fell into Mountain Time instead. Eighteen of Nebraska's ninety three counties, concentrated in the western Panhandle around towns like Scottsbluff and Kimball, keep Mountain Time today, an hour behind Omaha and Lincoln to the east.

The Depot Where Railroad Crews Switched Clocks by Hand

Before the federal government ever drew an official line through Nebraska, the boundary between Mountain and Central time existed only informally, and nowhere more awkwardly than at the Union Pacific depot in North Platte. From 1883 until 1918, railroad crews working that depot switched their own watches back and forth between Mountain and Central time as trains came and went, since the settlement sat almost exactly where the practical dividing line fell.

When Congress passed the Standard Time Act in 1918, it finally drew an official boundary, but the line it chose zigzagged awkwardly through several Nebraska counties rather than following a clean, straight border, crossing the Union Pacific tracks just west of North Platte and leaving thirteen border counties, including parts of Lincoln County, free to choose Central Time locally if they wished.

That zigzag survived for decades until the Uniform Time Act of 1966 threatened to force every county along the crooked old line to follow it strictly, with no more local discretion. The prospect triggered what one Nebraska newspaper later called three years of hollering in the state legislature, including a formal resolution, Legislative Resolution 276, asking Congress to shift the entire boundary west to the Colorado and Wyoming state lines instead, and a bruising floor fight over Legislative Bill 143 that state senators voted down 25 to 14. After years of public objection and lobbying, the U.S. Department of Transportation ultimately relented and redrew the line into something closer to the straighter, county line based boundary Nebraska uses today, finally retiring the crooked 1918 border that had cut so awkwardly through the middle of the state for nearly half a century.

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