Time in Guatemala: Time Zone, Difference with US Cities and When It Changes

Guatemala keeps the same clock all year: UTC-6. It does not switch to daylight saving time, so when the United States, Canada, Europe or Australia change their clocks, the time difference with Guatemala changes too, and it changes on their dates. That is why a search for the difference with New York gives two different answers depending on the month.

The table below is rebuilt by our daily data run from the IANA time zone database (tzdb) and shows each city’s difference with Guatemala today, the date it next changes and what it changes to.

Difference with Guatemala, and when it next changes

The rules behind the table

Guatemala: zone America/Guatemala, standard offset six hours behind UTC, no daylight-saving rule in force. The database’s name for it is CST, which is also what the US Central zone is called in winter, the one season the two actually match.

United States: under the rule the database has applied since 2007, US clocks go forward one hour at 2:00 local time on the second Sunday of March and back at 2:00 on the first Sunday of November. The database’s Phoenix and Honolulu zones do not change at all. For a traveller or a family calling between the two countries, that works out as:

Canada’s Eastern and Pacific cities follow the same dates as the US ones. The UK, the European Union, Australia and New Zealand change on their own dates, which is why the table above gives each one its own next-change date instead of a rule of thumb.

When Guatemala did change its clocks

The same database lists every change of Guatemala’s offset since 1970:

The last one was in 2006. The database’s notes cite a Diario Co Latino report that the Guatemalan government decided on 19 April 2006 to move official time forward 60 minutes to lessen the impact of high oil prices, and a Ministry of Energy and Mines press release (CP-15/2006) setting the end of that period. Clocks went back on 1 October 2006, and there has been no daylight time in Guatemala since.

Practical time questions

• Bank and government office hours are in Guatemala time, which matters for transfers sent from the US late in the day. See are banks open? for the closure calendar.
• Flights: airline timetables print local time at each end, so a flight’s clock duration and its real duration differ by the time difference on that date. Fares by US city are on flights to Guatemala prices.
• Sunrise and sunset for 22 cities and the main destinations are on sunrise and sunset times in Guatemala.

Where these numbers come from

The table and the history are computed from the IANA time zone database (the version is printed in the stamp above the table), refreshed by our daily data run. The difference in the Difference now column is picked when the page is built, from the dated periods in that data, so the page does not need a same-day refresh to show a change that has already happened. The IANA rule text for Guatemala and the US described on this page was read on 24 September 2026 from data.iana.org, then at release 2026d; the table itself is computed with the tzdb release printed in its stamp, which can be an older one.