Forex market hours: when each session opens and closes

The four sessions in UTC, why three of them move twice a year and Tokyo never does, and which overlap actually carries the volume.

Last verified 5 August 2026 · Scored against our published checklist

The currency market runs continuously from Sunday evening to Friday evening, but it is not equally busy at all hours. Trading follows the business day around the globe, handing off from one financial centre to the next, and the difference between a quiet hour and a busy one shows up directly in the spread you pay.

Below are the four sessions in UTC. Times are given for northern summer and northern winter, because three of the four move with daylight saving.

The four sessions

Each session runs nine hours.

Why Tokyo never moves

Japan does not observe daylight saving time. It is the only one of the four major centres that does not, so the Tokyo session sits at 00:00–09:00 UTC all year round while London, New York and Sydney each shift by an hour twice a year.

That has a consequence which catches people out: the relationship between sessions is not fixed. In northern summer London opens at 07:00 UTC, two hours before Tokyo closes. In northern winter it opens at 08:00 UTC, leaving a one-hour overlap instead of two.

Sydney adds a further wrinkle, because southern-hemisphere daylight saving runs on the opposite calendar to the northern one, so the Sydney–Tokyo relationship shifts on a different schedule again.

The overlap that matters

London and New York overlap from 12:00 to 16:00 UTC in northern summer, and from 13:00 to 17:00 in winter. Two of the largest centres are open at once, and this window concentrates the bulk of the day’s volume.

For a trader that is the practical point of the whole table: spreads are typically tightest during this overlap and widest in the thin hours after New York closes and before Tokyo picks up. When a broker advertises a headline spread, it is almost certainly measured inside a liquid window — not at 22:30 UTC on a Monday.

Tokyo also overlaps with Sydney for most of its session, but the combined volume of those two is considerably smaller than the London–New York window.

The weeks when the overlap moves

Europe and the United States do not change their clocks on the same day, and the gap between the two dates is not a technicality. The EU switches on the last Sunday in March and the last Sunday in October. The US switches on the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November, under the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

For three weeks in spring 2026, New York sits four hours behind London instead of the usual five. The London–New York overlap shifts by an hour, and so does everything pinned to it: when liquidity arrives, when the US data releases land relative to the London afternoon, and when the quiet stretch begins.

Nobody announces this. Charts keep displaying broker server time, which may follow neither calendar. If a strategy depends on being at the desk for the first hour of the New York session, it is worth putting these four dates in the calendar rather than discovering the shift on the morning it happens.

Holidays do not close the market, and that is the problem

The currency market has no central exchange to shut, so it keeps running through national holidays. What stops is the participation.

On Christmas Day, Good Friday or the Fourth of July the underlying banks in the affected centre are closed, liquidity thins out, and spreads widen while the platform still shows an open market. A stop placed in those conditions can be filled far from where it was set, because there is less depth behind the quote.

Japanese Golden Week in early May and the stretch between Christmas and New Year are the two long ones. Neither is marked on a price chart. Both are worth checking against the calendar of the centre whose currency you are trading, and brokers publish their own holiday schedules for exactly this reason.

When the week starts and ends

The week opens with Sydney on Sunday evening UTC and closes when New York finishes on Friday. Weekend gaps are a real risk: prices can move on news while the market is shut, and Monday’s opening quote may sit some distance from Friday’s close. A stop order does not protect against a gap, because there is no trading in between to fill it.

The opening hour is thin in a way the rest of the week is not. Sydney is the smallest of the four centres, and for the first hours of the week it trades largely alone, so the same order that moves nothing on Tuesday afternoon can move the quote noticeably on Sunday evening. Spreads at the open are routinely several times their weekday level, and they narrow as Tokyo joins.

This matters for anything that executes automatically. A pending order sitting from Friday triggers into the Sunday open at whatever price exists then, and an expert advisor that assumes weekday liquidity will size its trades against a market that is not there yet.

Where this shows up in costs

Overnight financing is applied at a fixed moment each day, commonly around 21:00 or 22:00 UTC depending on the provider, and a position held across that moment is charged for a full day regardless of how long it was actually open. Wednesday usually carries a triple charge, because it settles the coming weekend.

Check the exact rollover time in your broker’s own contract specifications rather than assuming. It varies between providers, and it is one of the more common sources of costs people do not expect.

Two details are worth pinning down before they cost you money.

Whether the rollover time follows daylight saving. Most brokers set it to 17:00 New York time, which moves against UTC twice a year. A position opened at 21:30 UTC in July may sit on the other side of rollover in January.

Which day carries the triple charge. Wednesday is the convention for most instruments, because spot settlement is two business days and Wednesday’s rollover carries the position across the weekend. It is not universal: some instruments settle differently, and a few brokers apply the triple on Friday. The contract specifications say which, and a position held over the wrong night costs three times what the trader expected.

What this means in practice

Session times are not trivia. They decide what you pay.

• The tightest spreads sit in the London–New York overlap. Everything a broker advertises as a typical spread was almost certainly measured there
• The thin hours are after the New York close and before Tokyo picks up. Same instrument, same broker, materially different cost
• Four dates a year shift the overlap by an hour, because Europe and the US change clocks on different Sundays
• Holidays thin liquidity without closing the market, which is worse than a clean closure, because the platform still looks normal

When we record a broker’s costs, we note the time the figure was taken, for this reason. A spread quoted without a timestamp says almost nothing; see the methodology.

Sources

• Myfxbook — Forex Market Hours
• BabyPips — Forex Market Hours tool
• FXOpen — Trading time zones and overlaps