PST to CST
Chicago is 2 hours ahead of Los Angeles, and does not change across the year.
PST and CST across the year
Both zones change their clocks on the same dates, so the gap between them never moves — Chicago is 2 hours ahead of Los Angeles 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.
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.
CST: CST is genuinely ambiguous: it means US Central Time (UTC−6) and also China Standard Time (UTC+8). This page uses US Central. For China, use the Shanghai converter.
PST to CST at a glance
Working-hours conversions, using the July relationship. The live converter above always reflects today.
| PST — Los Angeles | CST — Chicago |
|---|---|
| 8:00 am | 10:00 am |
| 9:00 am | 11:00 am |
| 10:00 am | 12:00 pm |
| 11:00 am | 1:00 pm |
| 12:00 pm | 2:00 pm |
| 1:00 pm | 3:00 pm |
| 2:00 pm | 4:00 pm |
| 3:00 pm | 5:00 pm |
| 4:00 pm | 6:00 pm |
| 5:00 pm | 7:00 pm |
Scheduling between Los Angeles and Chicago
The workable window is 9:00 am to 4:00 pm in Los Angeles — 11:00 am to 6:00 pm in Chicago. That is 7 hours out of a nine-hour working day, and everything outside it costs somebody their morning or their evening.
7 hours is a comfortable overlap; you can schedule inside it without much negotiation. The useful habit is still to put the Chicago 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 9:00 am Los Angeles time means Chicago is late in its afternoon and may be winding down; booking at 3:00 pm means Los Angeles is mid-afternoon while Chicago 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 Los Angeles
Chicago is ahead of you, which means their day is already ending as yours gets going. By the time you are at your desk at 9:00 am, it is 11:00 am there — so anything you send in your morning arrives in their afternoon, with time to act on it. The practical consequence is that your late afternoon is dead time for anything needing a reply from Chicago: they are asleep, and you will not hear back until your next morning.
So the discipline that pays off is front-loading. Anything Chicago needs from you should go out early in your day while they are still working; anything you need from them should be asked for before you leave, so it is waiting when you return. Treat their evening as the deadline, not yours.