EST to PST
Los Angeles is 3 hours behind New York, and does not change across the year.
EST and PST across the year
Both zones change their clocks on the same dates, so the gap between them never moves — Los Angeles is 3 hours behind New York all year. Note that this is a fixed difference, not a fixed offset: both cities still shift by an hour twice a year, so a time expressed in UTC will change even though the gap between these two does not.
EST: Eastern Time is EDT (UTC−4) in summer and EST (UTC−5) in winter. The figures here follow the current rule rather than assuming winter.
PST: Pacific Time shifts to PDT (UTC−7) during daylight saving and back to PST (UTC−8) in winter. Most people who search for PST mean whatever Pacific Time is right now, which is what this shows.
EST to PST at a glance
Working-hours conversions, using the July relationship. The live converter above always reflects today.
| EST — New York | PST — Los Angeles |
|---|---|
| 8:00 am | 5:00 am |
| 9:00 am | 6:00 am |
| 10:00 am | 7:00 am |
| 11:00 am | 8:00 am |
| 12:00 pm | 9:00 am |
| 1:00 pm | 10:00 am |
| 2:00 pm | 11:00 am |
| 3:00 pm | 12:00 pm |
| 4:00 pm | 1:00 pm |
| 5:00 pm | 2:00 pm |
Scheduling between New York and Los Angeles
The workable window is 12:00 pm to 6:00 pm in New York — 9:00 am to 3:00 pm in Los Angeles. That is 6 hours out of a nine-hour working day, and everything outside it costs somebody their morning or their evening.
6 hours is a comfortable overlap; you can schedule inside it without much negotiation. The useful habit is still to put the Los Angeles time in the invitation body as well as relying on the calendar to convert, because the person reading it on a phone will trust what they can see.
The two edges behave differently. Booking at 12:00 pm New York time means Los Angeles is late in its afternoon and may be winding down; booking at 5:00 pm means New York is mid-afternoon while Los Angeles is closer to the end of the day. Where the decision matters, give the later-in-the-day side the earlier slot.
If you are the one in New York
Los Angeles is behind you, so you get the day first. When you start at 9:00 am, it is 6:00 am there and nobody is up yet — which makes your morning the wrong time to expect an answer and your afternoon the right one. The upside of being ahead is that you can set the agenda: what you finish today lands on their desk at the start of their day, not the end of it.
So the discipline that pays off is writing things down before you finish. What you leave at the end of your day becomes their morning's work, and a clear handover buys you an entire working day of progress without a single meeting. What you leave vague costs you the same day waiting for a clarification.