Alaska Time Now

What this page shows

So you want to know what time it is in Alaska right now. Maybe you have a call with someone in the state, a flight to catch, a game starting on local time, or someone to reach before their evening is over. That is what the clock at the top of this page is for. It shows the current time in Alaska and ticks forward every second, so there is nothing for you to work out by hand.

Alaska keeps one main time zone across almost the whole state, so this clock is good from Anchorage to Fairbanks to Juneau. Wherever in the world you are reading from, it keeps itself right on its own, even across the days when the clocks change.

Alaska changes its clocks twice a year

Here is the part worth knowing about Alaska time. The state does not stay on the same clock all year. It uses Alaska Standard Time, AKST, through the winter, and moves an hour ahead to Alaska Daylight Time, AKDT, for the summer.

So there are two settings behind Alaska time:

• AKST, Alaska Standard Time. Nine hours behind UTC, written UTC minus 9. The winter setting, from early November to early March.
• AKDT, Alaska Daylight Time. Eight hours behind UTC, written UTC minus 8. The summer setting, from early March to early November.

The clock above follows whichever one is in force, so you do not have to track it yourself. The section further down spells out the dates if you ever need to work it out for a particular day.

What time zone Alaska is in

Alaska runs on Alaska Time, nine hours behind UTC in winter and eight hours behind in summer. That puts it one hour behind the US Pacific coast and four hours behind the East Coast. Almost the entire state keeps this single zone, which is striking given how vast Alaska is, wide enough that by longitude it could reasonably span several. The far-western Aleutian Islands are the one exception, sitting an hour further back again.

The other thing that defines Alaska time is the sheer swing of daylight, far more extreme than anywhere in the rest of the United States. The clock changes by a tidy hour twice a year, but the sky changes enormously between the seasons, as the facts below explain.

How to tell if Alaska is on AKST or AKDT right now

Alaska changes its clocks on two Sundays a year, and the dates are set in US law, the Uniform Time Act, last amended by the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the same dates the rest of the country uses:

• Spring forward. On the second Sunday of March, at 2 in the morning, the clocks jump ahead one hour. AKST becomes AKDT, and Alaska goes from UTC minus 9 to UTC minus 8.
• Fall back. On the first Sunday of November, at 2 in the morning, the clocks drop back one hour. AKDT becomes AKST again, at UTC minus 9.

So the rule is short. From the second Sunday of March to the first Sunday of November, Alaska is on AKDT. The rest of the year, early November round to early March, it is on AKST. Place today between those two Sundays and you have your answer.

Time difference from Alaska to other places

The places that share North America's daylight saving schedule stay a fixed distance from Alaska all year, while the ones on different schedules can shift by an hour at the edges of the seasons. Here is the quick reference, assuming it is 12 noon in Alaska.

A few quick examples

Let us run a few, so you can see how this works.

Say it is 12 noon in Alaska. Los Angeles is one hour ahead all year, so 1 in the afternoon on the West Coast, and New York is four hours ahead at 4 in the afternoon. In the winter, London is nine hours ahead, making it 9 in the evening there.

Now a call to London, which has one small catch. The US and the UK both change their clocks, but not on the same dates, so for a couple of short windows in spring and autumn the usual nine hour gap briefly shifts by an hour. For anything that has to land exactly in those weeks, trust the live clock over the rule of thumb.

And one for Asia, which is the real challenge. Tokyo is eighteen hours ahead of Alaska in winter, so 12 noon here is 6 in the morning the next day in Tokyo. There is no shared working hour at all, so those calls land in the early morning or late evening for one side.

A couple of things about Alaska time

Anchorage sits at about 61 degrees north, far higher than any city in the rest of the United States, so the daylight swings dramatically across the year. Around midsummer there are roughly nineteen hours between sunrise and sunset, with the sky barely darkening at night, while around midwinter that drops to only about five and a half hours, with the sun low and the afternoons short. Further north still, beyond the Arctic Circle, parts of Alaska get the true midnight sun in summer, when the sun never sets for weeks, and a polar night in winter, when it never properly rises.

On the clock-against-sun question, the offset matters far less here than the season. Alaska is so vast that the sun keeps quite different hours across the state, and at these latitudes the swing between summer and winter dwarfs any small lean of the clock against the sun. The single zone is a practical choice for a huge, thinly populated place, not a close match to the sun in any one spot.

Other places to compare

Alaska keeps its own zone, an hour behind the US Pacific coast. For the neighbouring zone and the country as a whole, here are a couple to jump to:

• PST Time Now, US Pacific, one hour ahead
• USA time now

And for the global reference Alaska is measured from, see UTC Time Now.

Questions people ask

What time is it in Alaska right now?

The clock near the top of this page is the answer, and it updates every second. Alaska keeps one main zone throughout. It changes its clocks, so it reads AKST in winter and AKDT in summer, and either way the time shown is correct.

Is Alaska on AKST or AKDT right now?

Go by the dates. Alaska is on AKDT from the second Sunday of March to the first Sunday of November. The rest of the year, from early November round to early March, it is on AKST. Find where today falls between those two Sundays and you will know.

Does all of Alaska have the same time?

Almost. The great majority of the state, including Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau, keeps Alaska Time. Only the far-western Aleutian Islands sit on a different zone, an hour further behind.

What time zone is Alaska in?

Alaska Time, nine hours behind UTC in winter and eight hours behind in summer. That is one hour behind the US Pacific coast and four hours behind the East Coast.

How many hours behind Los Angeles is Alaska?

One hour behind, all year. Both change their clocks on the same dates, so the one hour gap holds steady.

What is the IANA name for Alaska time?

It is America/Anchorage in the IANA time zone database, the time data your phone and your computer use. It carries both the AKST and AKDT offsets along with the rule for switching between them, and it is what drives the live clock on this page.

References

1. Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). Time Zone Database (the tz database), home of the America/Anchorage identifier. https://www.iana.org/time-zones
2. U.S. Code, Title 15, Section 260a: the Uniform Time Act of 1966, as amended by the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which sets the daylight saving dates. Office of the Law Revision Counsel. https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title15-section260a
3. U.S. Department of Transportation, Standard Time Zone Boundaries under 49 CFR Part 71. https://www.transportation.gov/regulations/time-act
4. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Time and Frequency Division, the source of official time for the United States. https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division