Daylight saving time changes in Oregon, United States

Oregon uses the IANA time zone identifier America/Los_Angeles. The current local offset is UTC-7 / PDT.

Best Time to Call Oregon

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

• Sao Paulo: 1:00 PM - 9:00 PM ( Partial overlap)
• Frankfurt: 6:00 PM - 2:00 AM (next day) ( Partial overlap)
• Johannesburg: 6:00 PM - 2:00 AM (next day) ( Partial overlap)
• Singapore: 12:00 AM (next day) - 8:00 AM (next day) ( Outside normal hours)
• Hong Kong: 12:00 AM (next day) - 8:00 AM (next day) ( Outside normal hours)
• Istanbul: 7:00 PM - 3:00 AM (next day) ( Partial overlap)
• Auckland: 4:00 AM (next day) - 12:00 PM (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 Oregon, United States

About Time in Oregon

The County That Looks East Instead of West

Nearly all of Oregon runs on Pacific time, but Malheur County, tucked into the state's far southeastern corner, has kept its clocks an hour ahead on Mountain time since the railroad era, a choice tied directly to geography rather than politics. The county's largest towns, including Ontario and Vale, sit just across the Snake River from Boise, Idaho, and depend on that Idaho metro area for commerce, shopping, and services far more than on Salem or Portland, hundreds of miles to the west. The Gate City Journal of Nyssa reported on May 11, 1923 that the hour ahead time change would take effect just two days later, formalizing a shift that local business and rail interests had already been moving toward.

More than a century on, the arrangement still produces genuine friction for the people who live with it daily. A member of the Oregon House of Representatives who splits his time between Ontario and a town on the Pacific side has described starting his legislative office hours well before colleagues in Salem specifically to accommodate constituents back home, and Malheur County residents have joked for decades about statewide maps that place their county entirely under the legend box, as though the mapmakers themselves had briefly forgotten they existed. Locals sometimes describe the situation more pointedly, noting that being on a different clock than the rest of Oregon is just one more sign that Malheur County does not always feel like part of the state at all.

The First American Soil to Go Dark

When the total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017 swept across the United States, its shadow crossed no other land at all before reaching the Oregon coast, making Oregon the very first place in the continental country to experience totality that day. After racing nearly a thousand miles across open ocean from a point south of Alaska's Aleutian Islands, the moon's umbral shadow made landfall between Lincoln City and Newport at approximately 10:15 to 10:17 a.m. Pacific time, marking the first total solar eclipse to touch the continental United States since 1979 and the first to cross the entire country coast to coast since 1918.

From that first contact on the Oregon coast, the shadow swept east across the state at roughly 1,600 miles per hour, exiting into Idaho only twelve minutes later while still delivering close to two minutes of full totality to a corridor running through Salem, Corvallis, and the town of Madras, which hosted a three day viewing festival timed around the event. Meteorologists who study eclipse weather patterns specifically flagged the Willamette Valley and the Deschutes River valley near Madras as offering some of the best cloud free viewing odds anywhere along the entire 2,500 mile path across the country, meaning the very first stretch of American ground the shadow touched also turned out to be one of the most reliable places to actually see it.

A Bill That Does Not Know Which Way to Turn the Clock

Oregon has spent years legislating its way toward the end of the twice yearly clock change without managing to actually stop it. In 2019, the legislature passed a law adopting year round daylight saving time for the Pacific time portion of the state, explicitly excluding Malheur County, which would have continued changing its Mountain time clocks as before. Then Governor Kate Brown signed the bill, but its effect was made contingent on Washington and California passing matching laws and on Congress granting the necessary federal approval, conditions that still had not been fully met years later, leaving the 2019 law on the books but never activated.

In 2025, Oregon senators tried a different approach. Senate Bill 1038, passed by the state Senate in a vote of 18 to 11, would let Oregon remain on either standard time or daylight saving time year round, whichever its neighbors Washington and California ultimately choose, rather than locking the state into one specific outcome in advance. One Oregon lawmaker involved in that debate said the point of the new approach was simply to give the state the best possible chance of finally escaping the twice yearly change, whichever direction the change ultimately runs, while acknowledging that the actual decision remains largely out of Oregon's hands. As with the 2019 law, any change approved under the new bill would still leave the Mountain time portion of Malheur County untouched.

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