Daylight saving time changes in New York, United States

New York uses the IANA time zone identifier America/New_York. The current local offset is UTC-4 / EDT.

Best Time to Call New York

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

• Sao Paulo: 10:00 AM - 6:00 PM ( Convenient)
• Frankfurt: 3:00 PM - 11:00 PM ( Partial overlap)
• Johannesburg: 3:00 PM - 11:00 PM ( Partial overlap)
• Singapore: 9:00 PM - 5:00 AM (next day) ( Partial overlap)
• Hong Kong: 9:00 PM - 5:00 AM (next day) ( Partial overlap)
• Istanbul: 4:00 PM - 12:00 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 New York, United States

About Time in New York

The World's Most Famous Clock Is a Navigation Tool in Disguise

The Times Square Ball, the single most watched timekeeping ceremony on Earth, descends from a tradition invented not for celebration but for survival at sea. In 1818, Robert Wauchope, a captain in Britain's Royal Navy who later became an admiral, conceived the idea of a large hollow metal sphere rigged to a pole that would drop at a precise, predictable moment each day, giving ship captains a visual signal to synchronize their chronometers, the instruments navigation at sea depended on entirely. His device was first tested at Portsmouth in 1829, and the Royal Observatory at Greenwich installed its own time ball in 1833, dropping it every day at exactly 1 p.m. so ships on the Thames could set their instruments, a tradition Greenwich still maintains today. The idea spread quickly, and roughly 150 public time balls eventually operated around the world, including one atop the U.S. Naval Observatory after its founding in 1845, which dropped at noon rather than 1 p.m.

New York's own version began purely as a practical necessity turned into publicity. The New York Times moved its headquarters to what was then Longacre Square in 1904, celebrating with a fireworks display that drew roughly 200,000 spectators and got the neighborhood renamed Times Square in the paper's honor. By 1907, city officials banned fireworks over safety concerns about fire and falling debris, leaving publisher Adolph Ochs searching for a replacement spectacle. His chief electrician, Walter Palmer, proposed reviving the old maritime time ball concept, an idea he likely knew firsthand from an existing time ball atop the Western Union Building in Manhattan's Financial District, which dropped daily at noon in sync with the U.S. Naval Observatory via telegraph line.

The first Times Square ball, built by immigrant metalworker Jacob Starr, weighed 700 pounds, was made of iron and wood, and carried 100 light bulbs when it debuted on December 31, 1907. It was lowered by hand using ropes for most of the twentieth century, a system finally automated in 1996 after a worker became tangled in the rope mechanism mid drop. The ceremony has been held every single year since 1907 with exactly two exceptions, 1942 and 1943, when wartime blackout restrictions darkened the city. Crowds still gathered those years anyway, greeting the new year with a minute of silence followed by chimes broadcast from sound trucks, a deliberate echo of the earlier New York tradition of crowds gathering at Trinity Church to ring bells and "ring out the old, ring in the new." The ball itself has been rebuilt repeatedly since, a 400 pound wrought iron version in 1920, a 150 pound aluminum version in 1955, and today's Waterford crystal Constellation Ball, weighing roughly 12,000 pounds and covered in 5,280 individual crystal triangles, a nautical safety device from the age of sail transformed, over more than a century, into the most watched second in American timekeeping.

The Clock Synced to an Atom, Wrapped in a Myth

Grand Central Terminal's four faced clock above the main concourse information booth has been New York City's default meeting spot since the terminal opened in 1913, a role so ingrained that Metro North employee uniforms carry the clock's logo permanently set to 19:13 in military time, marking the terminal's opening year. The clock itself was built by the Self Winding Clock Company with assistance from the Seth Thomas Clock Company of Connecticut, and its four convex faces are genuinely made of opal glass.

For most of the twentieth century, the clock had an odd flaw fitting for a station built on constant motion: its own four faces frequently disagreed with each other, each running on a slightly different local mechanism. That changed in 2004, when every clock in the terminal, including all four faces of the famous timepiece, was wired to a single master clock located on the terminal's lower level near Track 117, which is itself resynchronized every single second by a signal from an atomic clock at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Bethesda, Maryland.

The clock's other famous claim, that its opal faces are worth as much as 20 million dollars, does not hold up nearly as well under scrutiny. Researchers at Untapped New York traced the figure back to a since deleted, unsourced edit made to the clock's Wikipedia entry by an anonymous editor whose IP address geolocated to Croton on Hudson, New York, an edit that then spread uncritically into newspaper articles, tour scripts, and eventually countless retellings online. The clock remains a genuine architectural landmark and a technically fascinating example of atomic precision reaching all the way down to a Manhattan train station, even if its supposed multimillion dollar appraisal turns out to be an internet legend rather than a documented fact.

Frequently Asked Questions