What time is it in Hawaii?
Quick answer
Hawaii uses Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time (HST), which is UTC−10, all year round. It doesn’t observe daylight saving time, so its clocks never change. The live clock below shows the current time in Honolulu.
Honolulu, Hawaii
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Why Hawaii skips daylight saving time
Daylight saving makes the most sense far from the equator, where summer days are much longer than winter days. Hawaii sits in the tropics, at about 21° north, so its daylight hardly changes through the year: roughly 11 hours in December and 13 in June. Moving the clocks wouldn’t gain much evening light, so the state opted out in 1967.
Hawaii and most of Arizona are the only US states that stay on standard time all year.
How far behind is Hawaii?
Because the mainland changes its clocks and Hawaii doesn’t, the gap changes with the seasons:
| Place | Winter (Nov–Mar) | Summer (Mar–Nov) |
|---|---|---|
| California | Hawaii is 2 hours behind | 3 hours behind |
| New York | 5 hours behind | 6 hours behind |
| London | 10 hours behind | 11 hours behind |
| Tokyo | 19 hours behind | 19 hours behind |
So the evening news in New York airs while Hawaii is still in the middle of the afternoon.
One of the last places to see each day
Hawaii is one of the last populated places on Earth to reach midnight each night. When it’s New Year’s midnight in Honolulu, it’s already 9 p.m. on New Year’s Day in Sydney.
All of the Hawaiian islands, from Kauai to the Big Island, share the same time. The “Aleutian” part of the zone’s name refers to Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, which use the same offset in winter but do switch to daylight saving.
On the mainland, here’s what time it is in California, the closest major US time zone.
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