What time does the stock market open?

The exact opening and closing times

Both US exchanges keep the same schedule for continuous trading. The opening auction runs in the minutes before the bell and the closing auction in the minutes after it, which is why a quote can move slightly outside the window below.

Eastern Time is UTC−5 in winter and UTC−4 during daylight saving, which runs from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November.

Pre-market and after-hours trading

Outside the regular session there are two extended windows. They exist, but they are a thinner market: fewer participants, wider spreads and a mid-sized order can move the price several points. Each broker decides which part of the window it passes on to its clients.

Index futures are a separate market again: on CME Globex they trade from Sunday afternoon to Friday afternoon almost without a break. That is why the S&P 500 appears to move overnight while the exchange itself is shut — what is trading is the future, not the index.

When the rest of the world opens

"The stock market" means a different clock depending on where you are. These are the major exchanges in their own local time; the live clock converts all of them to yours at once.

See all 31 exchanges

Holidays and half days in 2026

The US market is shut on nine days of the year, and it closes at lunchtime on two more. Both kinds are already in the clock, so a holiday shows as an empty ring and a half day as a striped bar.

Why the opening time moves on your clock

If you follow Wall Street from outside the United States, the opening bell does not always land at the same local hour. The United States moves its clocks on the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November; the European Union does it on the last Sunday in March and the last Sunday in October. For two or three weeks a year the gap between the two is one hour narrower or wider than usual.

From Madrid, for example, Wall Street opens at 15:30 for most of the year but at 14:30 during the March mismatch. Markets that never change their clocks — Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Mumbai — drift against you twice a year without touching anything themselves.

This is why the clock on this site stores each market's official timezone instead of a fixed offset. The conversion is recomputed on every visit using the rules currently in force.