Forex trading sessions and market hours, UK time

The forex market is open 24 hours a day from Sunday evening to Friday evening, and that fact has cost beginners more sleep than any red day. Open is not the same as active. For long stretches of every night the market is thin and spreads widen, while much of the day's movement is packed into a few hours that most UK traders can reach without an alarm clock.

By the end of this you will have the four sessions in UK time in one table, know the weeks each year when clock changes put that table out by an hour, understand why the London–New York overlap carries so much of the day, and be able to choose one window you can keep every week. Every time here is approximate: sources differ by up to an hour at the edges, and your provider's server clock has the final say.

The trading week starts as Monday morning begins in the Asia-Pacific region, around 22:00 on Sunday UK time, and ends when New York closes on Friday, again around 22:00 UK time. In between, activity follows office hours as the working day moves west: Sydney, then Tokyo, then London, then New York.

Those centres are not equal. In the Bank for International Settlements' Triennial Survey of April 2025, the United Kingdom accounted for about 38% of global currency trading by location and the United States about 19%, with Singapore at 11.8% and Hong Kong at 7%. London is the largest trading centre in the world by a wide margin, which is why its hours shape the day for everybody. For anyone trading from the UK that is a happy accident: the busiest hours fall in your daytime.

Each session is the working day of a financial centre. The table converts them to UK time for both halves of the year. The two columns swap over when UK clocks change, on the last Sunday in March and the last Sunday in October.

Read the table as a guide to who is awake, not as a timetable of when to trade. A session does not switch on at its first minute. Activity builds into the London open, is usually at its heaviest while London and New York overlap, and thins through the evening as first London and then New York go home.

The UK and the US both move their clocks, but not on the same dates. UK clocks go forward on the last Sunday in March and back on the last Sunday in October. US clocks go forward on the second Sunday in March and back on the first Sunday in November. In the weeks between, New York is four hours behind London instead of five.

For those weeks, everything tied to New York happens an hour earlier in UK time. The New York session opens at about 12:00 UK time rather than 13:00, the overlap starts at 12:00, and US data released at 8:30 New York time lands at 12:30 UK time instead of 13:30. In spring the mismatch lasts two or three weeks; in autumn, one week.

Tokyo moves in UK terms too, because Japan does not change its clocks at all, so its session starts at midnight UK time in winter and 01:00 in summer. Sydney is the loosest row in the table. Daylight saving in New South Wales runs from the first Sunday in October to the first Sunday in April, the opposite season to the UK's, so the gap between Sydney and the UK swings between nine and eleven hours across the year. Treat Sydney as late evening to early morning UK time, and check your platform for the exact hour.

For about four hours, from 13:00 to 17:00 UK time for most of the year, the two largest trading centres are open together. Banks in both cities are quoting, funds on both sides of the Atlantic are executing, and the dollar, the most traded currency of all, is at the centre of it. Liquidity is usually at its deepest and spreads on the major pairs at their tightest.

The overlap also concentrates scheduled events. Major US releases, including the monthly employment report and inflation figures, come out at 8:30 New York time, which is 13:30 UK time for most of the year. And a widely used set of benchmark exchange rates, the WM/Reuters 4pm London fix, is set around 16:00 London time, so orders timed for it can bunch up in the minutes before.

Busy is not the same as better. The overlap offers tight spreads and real movement, and it moves fastest exactly when an unprepared trader is least able to cope. A plan for these hours needs written rules for the 13:30 releases. A plan for the quiet Tokyo hours needs patience instead, because there may be nothing to do. Neither is easier. They ask for different behaviour.

The best session for you is the one you can attend every week at full attention, without bargaining with your job, your family or your sleep. Start from that and fit the market to it, not the other way round. If your window is the evening after work, our lesson on trading alongside a full-time job covers the week around it.

A session is not an opportunity. It is a set of conditions: who is trading, how fast price moves, what is on the calendar. Choose your conditions on purpose, learn them on demo until nothing in them surprises you, and close the laptop when the window ends, however tempting the next hour looks. The market will still be there tomorrow.