Forex market hours in UK time

Currency trading starts Sunday at 10pm UK time and runs through until Friday at 10pm UK time. Since there's no central exchange, large banks pass trading from city to city throughout the day for 24 hours on each weekday. You can trade at any hour from Sunday night through Friday night.

The market closes at 10pm on Friday for the weekend and remains shut all day on Saturday. There's also no trading on Christmas Day or New Year's Day. Other public holidays don't close the market, though some currency pairs may pause while local banks are shut.

If you keep a trade open past 10pm UK time, your broker calculates an overnight charge or credit called a swap. Many traders who operate during the day close positions before 10pm, so they don't pay this overnight cost. You can first test the daily times on a demo forex account and see how they work.

There are 4 main trading windows in the global forex market hours: Sydney, Tokyo, London and New York. UK times follow Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT, during winter. In summer, UK clocks move ahead by 1 hour and use British Summer Time, or BST.

On your UK clock, the London session forex time is 8am to 5pm throughout the year. Overseas daylight saving changes mean the other sessions shift by 1 hour between summer and winter. Local currencies are most active in each window, with pairs such as GBP/USD appearing on your screen.

Since currency trading has no central opening bell, brokers sometimes publish session hours that differ slightly. Our timings follow the UK timetable published by IG. CMC Markets and Pepperstone list the London window from 8am to 4pm GMT, while Tokyo runs from 12am to 9am GMT. For Sydney, CMC Markets lists 8pm to 5am UK time. In every timetable you read, trading continues when one session ends because the next centre is already open.

Britain leads the world as a centre for currency trading. From 8am to 5pm UK time, Britain handles 35% to 43% of worldwide volume. This heavy trading volume creates high liquidity. The number of buyers and sellers trading at any one time is called liquidity, and it helps you trade at a steady price.

High volume also narrows the spread. The spread is the small difference between your buying and selling prices, which is the cost you pay to trade. The London and New York crossover is the busiest period. It runs from 1pm to 5pm GMT in winter and from 2pm to 6pm BST in summer. The afternoon crossover represents 50% to 60% of that day's price movement.

EUR/USD can move 80 to 120 pips during the overlap, compared with 40 pips when a session runs alone. Currency exchange rates use the pip as a standard tiny unit for measuring price changes. More than 85% of all currency trades include the US dollar. Major US data usually lands between 1:30pm and 3pm UK time, before the US stock market opens in UK time at 2:30pm.

UK workday trading usually offers tighter spreads from 8am to 5pm than late-night trading. Between 10pm and 12am UK time, spreads widen because New York has closed and Tokyo hasn't opened.

The UK changes its clocks on a different Sunday from the United States. This difference shifts afternoon trading times by 1 hour for a period. On the final Sunday of March at 1am, UK clocks move forward 1 hour to begin BST. On the final Sunday of October at 2am, UK clocks move back 1 hour and GMT returns.

In the United States, daylight saving starts at 2am local time on the second Sunday of March. The first Sunday of November brings an end to daylight saving at 2am local time. The mismatch happened twice in 2026, from 8 March to 29 March and from 25 October to 1 November. On your UK clock, the New York session appears 1 hour earlier in those weeks, as do any US data releases.

You'll also see a different clock on many spread betting and CFD apps. At Pepperstone, platform server time uses GMT+3 from March to November and GMT+2 from November to March. Brokers configure this so daily price charts end at 10pm UK time, at the same time as the New York session.