Check the current local time in San Francisco, United States. San Francisco uses the America/Los_Angeles time zone, with PST (UTC -8:00) during standard time and PDT (UTC -7:00) during daylight saving time.
America/Los_Angeles
San Francisco, United States
Current zone: PDT
Source: IANA Time Zone Database
PST
UTC -8:00
Used outside daylight saving time
PDT
UTC -7:00
Observed during daylight saving time
DST ends
November 1, 2026
Based on Second Sunday in March / First Sunday in November
San Francisco runs on Pacific Time (PST/PDT). Silicon Valley and the SF tech ecosystem operate on this clock — SaaS, venture capital, most consumer tech HQs are all here. Business hours skew later than East Coast (10 AM starts are normal, calls run to 8 PM PT). Time zone gap with India (13.5 h behind IST winter) drives most engineering handover calls to happen in the 8-10 AM PT / 9-10:30 PM IST window.
North America runs five continental-US timezones (Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, Alaskan) plus Newfoundland (a 30-minute offset from Atlantic Time — one of the few 30-minute timezones outside Asia). DST is nearly universal (except Arizona, Hawaii, most of Saskatchewan) and runs March → November. Business scheduling defaults to Eastern for multi-office US corporations regardless of headquarters.
San Francisco operates on the America/Los_Angeles timezone, switching between PST (Pacific Standard Time, UTC −8:00) in winter and PDT (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC −7:00) from mid-March to early November. While San Francisco shares a timezone with Los Angeles, the city carries its own outsized global significance as the cultural and geographic centre of Silicon Valley — the world's most concentrated technology ecosystem.
San Francisco is home to or adjacent to the headquarters of Apple, Google, Meta, Salesforce, Twitter/X, Uber, Airbnb, and hundreds of major tech companies and venture capital firms. The tech industry's culture of global remote work has made Pacific Time — and specifically San Francisco's business hours — one of the most widely attended time slots in international video conferencing. An all-hands meeting at a San Francisco tech company at 10:00 AM PST reaches employees in London at 6:00 PM GMT, in Singapore at 2:00 AM (next day), and in Sydney at 5:00 AM.
San Francisco observes daylight saving time on the same US federal schedule as Los Angeles: clocks spring forward on the second Sunday in March and fall back on the first Sunday in November. The Bay Area's latitude means the practical impact on sunrise/sunset times is more pronounced than in Southern California, with significantly longer summer days.
The San Francisco Bay Area spans multiple cities — San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Berkeley, Palo Alto, Mountain View — all sharing PST/PDT. Despite the region's global tech influence, the timezone gap with Asia (15–17 hours behind Tokyo, 15–16 hours behind Singapore) remains one of the biggest operational challenges for Silicon Valley companies with large Asia-Pacific engineering teams.
San Francisco / Bay Area business hours run 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM PST/PDT, Monday to Friday. Many tech companies operate flexible hours from 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM.
Daylight Saving Time
DST ends on November 1, 2026. Clocks fall back — sunrise and sunset shift one hour earlier in San Francisco.
These cities share the same time zone as San Francisco — when it's 12:25:56 AM here, it's the same local time there.
Major cities in United States — some may be in a different time zone than San Francisco if the country spans multiple zones.
Find the perfect overlap time between your timezone and San Francisco. Our calculator shows when business hours align.
Calculate Best Calling TimeEverything you need to know about San Francisco time
