Mexico City
UTC−6Mexico · CST
Thu, 13 Aug 2026
Timezone Guide
Mexico City, Mexico runs on UTC−6. This time zone stays fixed year-round at UTC−6 — daylight saving time is not observed. There is a 2-hour difference between Mexico City and New York. Standard 9-to-6 working hours overlap for about 7 hours a day with New York. A good time to connect: 09:00–16:00 in Mexico City lines up with 11:00–18:00 in New York. There is a 7-hour difference between Mexico City and London. Standard 9-to-6 working hours overlap for about 2 hours a day with London. A good time to connect: 09:00–11:00 in Mexico City lines up with 16:00–18:00 in London. There is a 15-hour difference between Mexico City and Tokyo. Standard working hours don't overlap at all with Tokyo, so meetings need an early or late slot on one side. This timezone is also shared with cities such as Denver. Keeping these offsets in mind makes it easier to schedule calls or travel to and from Mexico City.
Practical Info
Mexico City (Mexico) is home to roughly 21.6M people. Today brings about 14.1 hours of daylight: sunrise at 06:00, sunset at 20:06. This time zone stays fixed year-round at UTC−6 — daylight saving time is not observed. It sits in the Northern Hemisphere, about 19° north of the equator. Traffic drives on the right.
Flag
Mexico
Capital
Mexico City 👑
Continent
North America
Time Zone
CST · America/Mexico_City
Coordinates
19.43°N, 99.13°W
Currency
MXN ($)
Calling Code
+52
Driving Side
Right
Hemisphere
Northern
Language
Spanish
Measurement System
Metric
Did You Know?
Mexico City Is Going Down, and NASA Just Measured It
Mexico City was built on a drained lake, and the lake has never fully agreed to the arrangement.
In April 2026, NASA released the first measurements from NISAR — a radar satellite launched in 2025 that can track ground movement from orbit to within a centimetre. It found that Mexico City is sinking by roughly 25 centimetres a year. In the worst-affected spots, including the international airport and the ground beneath the Angel of Independence, it is going down by more than two centimetres every month.
Human fingernails grow about 40 millimetres a year. Parts of this city are descending faster than that.
The cumulative figure is the one that stops you: in less than a century, the ground has dropped more than twelve metres. An engineer first wrote the problem down in 1925. Nobody has been able to stop it since, because the cause is that twenty million people need water and the water is being pumped out from underneath them.
You can see the result without instruments. The cathedral leans. Doorframes have gone diamond-shaped. Sections of the Metro have been bent out of true by ground that will not stay still.
The clock: in October 2022, after twenty-six years of it, Mexico abolished daylight saving time nationwide. The argument that finally won was not about energy or commerce. It was about children walking to school in the dark.
Mexico City is now permanently fixed at UTC−6, and the matter is considered closed. Which puts it in a small and growing club: Türkiye froze its clocks in 2016, Brazil in 2019, Mexico in 2022. Three enormous countries on three continents, quietly reaching the same conclusion — moving the clock never actually made the day any longer.
Sources
- NASA/JPL, "US-Indian Space Mission Maps Extreme Subsidence in Mexico City" (April 2026; NISAR preliminary measurements Oct 2025–Jan 2026)
- Mexico News Daily
- Chaussard et al. (2021), Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth
- InSAR study of Metro infrastructure (PMC10933379)
Annual Daylight
Working Hours