Forex market hours: sessions, overlaps and the best time to trade

Forex market hours run 24 hours a day, five days a week: from Sunday 5:00 p.m. New York time, as Monday begins in Sydney, to Friday 5:00 p.m. New York time. With no central exchange, dealers in one financial centre after another carry the market. The day is usually split into four sessions, Sydney, Tokyo, London and New York, and the hours when two overlap are the busiest.

Below: the session times in UTC and in your own clock, why the overlaps matter for spreads, and how to check the forex week in code. It is a companion to our exchange rate API guide, and it pairs with stock market hours if you follow equities too.

Forex trading sessions and their times

Many tables print these sessions in New York time: Sydney 5:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m., Tokyo 7:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m., London 3:00 a.m. to noon, New York 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Eastern. Those figures hold for part of the year only. Tokyo never changes its clocks, Sydney changes them in the opposite direction, and Europe switches on different weekends from the US, so each session drifts against New York on its own schedule.

Session overlaps: when the market is deepest

A currency pair is most liquid when the banks that deal it most are at their desks, and the overlaps are where two centres' business days meet. London alone handles more than a third of global currency turnover, so any hour London shares with another centre tends to be busy:

• London and New York, 12:00 to 16:00 UTC in summer (8:00 a.m. to noon New York). The deepest four hours of the day for EURUSD, GBPUSD and the dollar generally; US economic data at 8:30 a.m. ET lands inside it.
• Tokyo and London, 07:00 to 09:00 UTC in summer. Short, but it is when European desks pick up the yen and the Asian session hands over.
• Sydney and Tokyo, 00:00 to 06:00 UTC in summer. The busiest stretch of the Asian day for AUDUSD, NZDUSD and USDJPY.

When does the forex market open and close?

The forex week opens on Sunday at 5:00 p.m. New York time, which is 21:00 UTC while New York is on daylight time and 22:00 UTC in winter, and it closes on Friday at the same New York hour. Prices trade continuously in between, but every day at 5:00 p.m. New York the market rolls open positions to the next value date. For a few minutes around that rollover liquidity thins and spreads can jump to several times their daytime width.

The weekend is the one real gap. News that breaks on Saturday gets priced at the Sunday open, so the first quote of the week can sit well away from Friday's last one. Charts show that as a gap, and a bot that treats it as an ordinary tick-to-tick move will overreact to it.

Check the forex week in code

The market status API gives a quick answer. For forex it runs on a UTC schedule, Sunday 22:00 to Friday 22:00 UTC:

{
  "asset": "forex",
  "market": "FOREX",
  "status": "open",1
  "is_open": true,
  "phase": "primary",
  "reason": "Forex session (UTC schedule)",
  "timestamp": "2026-09-28T10:50:22.799Z",
  "timezone": "UTC",2
  "local_time": "2026-09-28T10:50:22.799Z",
  "symbol": "EURUSD",
  "next_close": "2026-10-02T22:00:00.000Z",3
  "meta": { "calendar_version": "v1-static-2026-2027" }
}

That schedule is fixed in UTC while the real week follows New York's 5:00 p.m., so while New York is on daylight time the first and last hour of the week (21:00 to 22:00 UTC) can disagree with the calendar. Treat the status as the shape of the week and let the quotes decide: if the latest EURUSD quote carries an old timestamp on a weekday, it is stale whatever the calendar says. The exchange calendar API guide covers the other endpoints, and live quotes for all four sessions come from the forex API.

Forex market hours converter: sessions in your time zone

Session times in your own clock depend on four sets of daylight saving rules, so let the time zone database do the work. This script uses only the Python standard library. It prints the current or next window of each session in any IANA time zone and marks the ones open now:

import sys
from datetime import datetime, time, timedelta
from zoneinfo import ZoneInfo  # Python 3.9+

# Each centre's business day in its own clock. DST is applied per city.
SESSIONS = [
    ("Sydney", "Australia/Sydney", time(7), time(16)),
    ("Tokyo", "Asia/Tokyo", time(9), time(18)),
    ("London", "Europe/London", time(8), time(17)),
    ("New York", "America/New_York", time(8), time(17)),
]
NEW_YORK = ZoneInfo("America/New_York")


def forex_week_open(now):
    """Open from Sunday 17:00 to Friday 17:00, New York time."""
    ny = now.astimezone(NEW_YORK)
    minutes = ny.hour * 60 + ny.minute
    if ny.weekday() == 5:  # Saturday
        return False
    if ny.weekday() == 6:  # Sunday
        return minutes >= 17 * 60
    if ny.weekday() == 4:  # Friday
        return minutes < 17 * 60
    return True


def next_window(zone, start, end, now):
    """Current or next weekday window of one session, as aware datetimes."""
    tz = ZoneInfo(zone)
    day = now.astimezone(tz).date()
    while True:
        opens = datetime.combine(day, start, tzinfo=tz)
        closes = datetime.combine(day, end, tzinfo=tz)
        if day.weekday() < 5 and closes > now:
            return opens, closes
        day += timedelta(days=1)


viewer = ZoneInfo(sys.argv[1] if len(sys.argv) > 1 else "UTC")
now = datetime.now(viewer)
print(f"{now:%a %d %b %H:%M} {viewer.key}, forex week open: {forex_week_open(now)}")
for name, zone, start, end in SESSIONS:
    opens, closes = next_window(zone, start, end, now)
    flag = "OPEN" if opens <= now < closes else ""
    print(f"  {name:<9} {opens.astimezone(viewer):%a %H:%M} to {closes.astimezone(viewer):%a %H:%M}  {flag}")

Mon 28 Sep 05:57 America/Chicago, forex week open: True
  Sydney    Mon 16:00 to Tue 01:00
  Tokyo     Mon 19:00 to Tue 04:00
  London    Mon 02:00 to Mon 11:00  OPEN
  New York  Mon 07:00 to Mon 16:00

Pass Europe/Istanbul, Asia/Singapore or America/Los_Angeles instead and the table follows. Because each window is computed in its own city, the output stays right through the weeks when Sydney, London and New York change clocks on different weekends. The Sydney line shows Tuesday's session: Monday's had already ended when the script ran.

The best time to trade forex

Most people asking this mean "when is it cheapest and most liquid to trade", and the answer is the overlap of the two centres that deal your pair. That is a statement about trading costs, not a recommendation to trade:

Spreads are the cheapest way to see liquidity for yourself. Poll a pair's quote every 15 minutes for a week, which is under 700 requests, and chart ask - bid by hour. The bid-ask spread explainer has the arithmetic, and what is a pip converts the result into the unit forex traders quote.

Forex has no exchange holidays, but it has thin days. When a centre is on holiday its session goes quiet and spreads widen: US Thanksgiving, Christmas week, New Year's Day, Golden Week in Japan. The world market hours pages list the 2026 holidays for 38 countries, which is a fair guide to when each centre is away.