Forex Trading Hours in 2026: Sessions, Overlaps and DST Shifts

Forex is open 24 hours a day, five days a week — but it is not equally liquid for those 24 hours. The market opens Sunday at 17:00 New York time and closes Friday at 17:00 New York time, and inside that window liquidity moves around the planet in a predictable relay: Sydney, then Tokyo, then London, then New York.

The part most hours guides get wrong is that these times are local. Three of the four centres change clocks on different dates, so the UTC timetable you memorise in September is wrong by the first week of November. In 2026 there is even a one-week window — 25 October to 1 November — when the London–New York overlap is five hours instead of the usual four.

Below is the full timetable in UTC, the overlaps that actually carry volume, the 2026 clock-change dates, and the two hours of the day when spreads reliably get worse.

Why session times matter at all

Because turnover is enormous but concentrated. The Bank for International Settlements' 2025 Triennial Survey put global FX trading at $9.6 trillion per day in April 2025, up 28% from 2022, with the US dollar on one side of 89% of all trades. Crucially, sales desks in just four locations — the UK, the US, Singapore and Hong Kong SAR — handled 75% of it, and the UK alone accounted for 38% (BIS, 30 September 2025).

That single number explains the whole trading day. When London desks are not at their screens, more than a third of the market's capacity is offline. Spreads widen, depth thins, and the same headline moves price further than it would at 13:00 UTC.

The four sessions in UTC (as of 7 September 2026)

Session windows below use the conventional 08:00–17:00 local business day for each centre (09:00–18:00 for Tokyo, 07:00–16:00 for Sydney). The UTC column is what your platform clock and your economic calendar actually run on.

Session	Local hours	UTC now (7 Sep 2026)	UTC after 1 Nov 2026
Sydney	07:00–16:00 AEST/AEDT	21:00–06:00	20:00–05:00
Tokyo	09:00–18:00 JST	00:00–09:00	00:00–09:00
London	08:00–17:00 BST/GMT	07:00–16:00	08:00–17:00
New York	08:00–17:00 EDT/EST	12:00–21:00	13:00–22:00

Japan is the only one of the four that never changes its clocks, which is why the Tokyo session is the one fixed reference point in the whole schedule: 00:00–09:00 UTC, all year.

The overlaps are the trading day

Two sessions open at once means two order books competing, tighter spreads and more follow-through. There are three overlaps, and they are not equal.

Overlap	UTC now	Length	What it is good for
Sydney–Tokyo	00:00–06:00	6h	AUD, NZD, JPY crosses; range conditions
Tokyo–London	07:00–09:00	2h	The handover; JPY pairs, early European positioning
London–New York	12:00–16:00	4h	Deepest liquidity of the day; US data, EUR/USD, GBP/USD

If you only trade one window, it is the London–New York overlap. It contains the 12:30 and 14:00 UTC US data releases, the 15:00 UTC London 4pm fix (16:00 BST) used to benchmark huge institutional flows, and the highest depth of book of the week outside a central-bank decision. Our economic calendar is the fastest way to see which releases land inside it on a given day.

The 2026 clock changes — and the week the overlap grows

Three of the four centres shift, on three different dates:

• Sunday 4 October 2026 — Sydney moves to AEDT (UTC+11). The Asian open arrives one hour earlier in UTC.
• Sunday 25 October 2026 — London leaves BST for GMT. London's day moves one hour later in UTC.
• Sunday 1 November 2026 — New York leaves EDT for EST. The US day moves one hour later in UTC.

Because London switches a week before New York, the gap between the two narrows for exactly one week. From 25 October to 1 November 2026 the London–New York overlap runs 12:00–17:00 UTC — five hours, not four. From 2 November it settles at 13:00–17:00 UTC.

Practical consequence: if your strategy is time-boxed — a London-open breakout, a New-York-session mean reversion, a scheduled news filter — the boxes need moving twice this autumn, on 25 October and again on 1 November. Traders who automate around a fixed UTC clock and forget this typically spend that week trading a window that no longer matches the liquidity.

The two hours you should probably skip

Daily rollover, 17:00 New York time (21:00 UTC now, 22:00 UTC from 2 November). This is when brokers roll positions to the next value date and apply swap. Liquidity providers step back for a few minutes either side, spreads on even EUR/USD can multiply, and stops sitting in that window get filled at prices that look nothing like the chart. Spot FX settles T+2, so the Wednesday rollover carries three days of swap — the familiar "triple swap Wednesday".

The Friday close into the Sunday open. The market stops at 17:00 ET Friday and restarts at 17:00 ET Sunday, but the world does not. Weekend headlines are priced into the first prints of the new week, which is why gap risk is a weekend problem, not an intraday one. If you carry positions through, size for the gap rather than for the stop.

Scalpers feel both of these hardest, because a two-pip strategy has no tolerance for a six-pip spread. If that is your style, execution quality matters more than session choice — we cover what to look for in the best forex brokers for scalping.

What "24-hour" is starting to mean for stocks too

Round-the-clock trading is spreading beyond FX. NYSE Arca plans to launch a fourth, overnight session on 6 December 2026, taking the exchange to 23 hours a day, five days a week — 21:00 ET through 20:00 ET, with a one-hour break for clearing and the transition to the next trade date (NYSE Extended-Hours FAQ, v4.0, August 2026, subject to SEC approvals and DTCC readiness).

That does not make overnight equity liquidity comparable to the London–New York overlap; it means access is available, not that depth is. The FX lesson applies directly: an open market and a liquid market are two different things, and the spread tells you which one you are in.

A simple way to choose your hours

1. Pick the pair first, then the session. EUR/USD, GBP/USD and USD/CHF belong to London and the London–New York overlap. USD/JPY, AUD/JPY and AUD/USD are Asia-session instruments. Trading a euro pair at 02:00 UTC is fighting the spread for no reason.
2. Match the window to the strategy. Breakouts want the London and New York opens; range and mean-reversion approaches suit the Asian session, where the same pair moves less.
3. Set your platform to UTC or exchange time, not local. Then a clock change moves the sessions on your chart, not in your head.
4. Filter by the calendar, not by the hour. An empty Tuesday 13:00 UTC and an ECB-decision Thursday 13:00 UTC are not the same trading environment.

Session timing decides when a trade has the best odds of behaving normally. It does not decide direction, and no timetable substitutes for risk control: leveraged FX and CFDs can lose money quickly, and most retail accounts do. Nothing here is investment advice.

If you want the session structure applied to live setups rather than theory, our forex signals hub shows how entries are timed around the London and New York windows, and our guide to choosing a forex broker in 2026 covers the spread and execution differences that show up hardest at rollover. When you are ready to trade the overlap rather than read about it, you can open a trading account.