Cricket Time Zones: A US Viewer's Conversion Guide
Written and checked by CricketTakenPublished Cricket in the United States9 min read
Cricket's scheduling problem in the United States is not that matches are on at bad times. It is that the times move, in ways that catch out even people who have followed the sport here for years.
An evening Indian Premier League match beginning at 7.30pm in Mumbai starts at 10.00am on the American east coast — but only for part of the year, because India never changes its clocks and the United States does. A Test in Melbourne begins on the American evening of the previous calendar day. A Twenty20 in Auckland can start on a date that has not yet arrived where you are. And twice a year there are stretches of two or three weeks when every conversion table you have memorised is out by an hour, because the United States and the United Kingdom change their clocks on different Sundays.
This page is the arithmetic, laid out once. It pairs with the guide to how to watch cricket in the USA, which covers the services and the calendar; this one covers only the clock.
Work in UTC and the problem disappears
Every conversion becomes trivial if you stop comparing local times to local times and route everything through Coordinated Universal Time.
Two steps. First, convert the published local start time to UTC by subtracting that country's offset. Second, convert UTC to your own time by adding your offset, which is negative in the United States. A 7.30pm start in India, which runs five and a half hours ahead of UTC, is 14.00 UTC. Add the eastern offset — minus four hours in the American summer — and you have 10.00am.
The reason this is worth the discipline is that the offsets are stable and the local times are not. Broadcast schedules, cricket boards and news sites all publish start times in the host country's local time, and that time means different things in America in April than it does in November.
The American side of the equation
The United States has four time zones in the contiguous states plus two more further west, and it changes clocks on the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November.
| Zone | Standard time | Daylight time |
|---|---|---|
| Eastern | UTC−5 | UTC−4 |
| Central | UTC−6 | UTC−5 |
| Mountain | UTC−7 | UTC−6 |
| Pacific | UTC−8 | UTC−7 |
| Alaska | UTC−9 | UTC−8 |
| Hawaii–Aleutian | UTC−10 | UTC−9 |
Two exceptions matter for cricket viewers. Most of Arizona does not observe daylight saving, which means Phoenix sits with Pacific time in summer and Mountain time in winter — the Navajo Nation within Arizona does observe it. Hawaii does not observe it either, and neither do Puerto Rico, Guam or the US Virgin Islands.
The cricket world's clocks
These are the offsets that matter, and the column on the right is the one people forget.
| Country | Offset | Changes clocks? |
|---|---|---|
| England and Wales | UTC+0, or UTC+1 in summer | Yes — last Sunday in March to last Sunday in October |
| India | UTC+5:30 | No |
| Pakistan | UTC+5 | No |
| Sri Lanka | UTC+5:30 | No |
| Bangladesh | UTC+6 | No |
| United Arab Emirates | UTC+4 | No |
| South Africa | UTC+2 | No |
| Australia (Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart) | UTC+10, or UTC+11 in summer | Yes — first Sunday in October to first Sunday in April |
| Australia (Adelaide) | UTC+9:30, or UTC+10:30 in summer | Yes, same dates |
| Australia (Brisbane, Perth, Darwin) | UTC+10 and UTC+8 | No — Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory do not |
| New Zealand | UTC+12, or UTC+13 in summer | Yes — last Sunday in September to first Sunday in April |
Most of the cricket world does not adjust its clocks at all. India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the UAE and South Africa hold a fixed offset year round, and the Caribbean islands largely do the same. That means the only variable in those conversions is what the United States is doing.
Australia is the complicated case, because it splits internally. A Twenty20 in Brisbane and one in Sydney on the same January evening are an hour apart on the clock, and a match in Perth is three hours behind Sydney.
The weeks when the usual answer is wrong
Twice a year the United States and the countries that do change clocks are out of step, and the gap between them shifts by an hour for a few weeks. This is the single most common source of a missed start.
- March. The United States moves forward on the second Sunday in March. The United Kingdom does not move until the last Sunday in March. For those two or three weeks the transatlantic gap is an hour smaller than usual, so English cricket starts an hour earlier on an American clock than it will in April.
- Late October to early November. The United Kingdom falls back on the last Sunday in October; the United States waits until the first Sunday in November. For that week the gap narrows again.
- Early April. Australian daylight saving ends on the first Sunday in April, while American daylight saving has already begun. Both changes push in the same direction, and the difference between Sydney and New York moves by a full two hours across a fortnight.
- Early October. The reverse: Australia moves forward on the first Sunday in October while the United States is still on daylight time, then the United States falls back a month later.
The practical rule is to distrust any remembered start time in March, early April, late October and early November, and to check the actual date rather than the season.
Worked examples
The method, applied to the fixtures Americans most often want.
An Indian Premier League evening match published as 7.30pm Indian time is 14.00 UTC. In the American summer that is 10.00am Eastern, 9.00am Central, 8.00am Mountain and 7.00am Pacific. An afternoon match published as 3.30pm Indian time is 10.00 UTC — 6.00am Eastern, and 3.00am on the west coast. The competition's own shape and calendar are covered in the Indian Premier League guide.
A Big Bash League evening match in Sydney in January, with New South Wales on daylight time at UTC+11, converts to 08.15 UTC for a 7.15pm start. That is 3.15am Eastern and 12.15am Pacific — the one major competition where the west coast has the better deal. The competition is described in the Big Bash League guide.
An English Test starting at 11.00am in June, with Britain on summer time at UTC+1, is 10.00 UTC, which is 6.00am Eastern and 3.00am Pacific. The first session is over before most of the country is at work. The series calendar and what it means for viewers is in the guide to the Ashes, and the shorter English competition in the guide to the Hundred.
A South African evening fixture at 5.30pm local, at UTC+2, is 15.30 UTC — 11.30am Eastern, which is the most convenient overseas cricket available to an American audience.
Test cricket does not fit inside an American day
Multi-day cricket creates a problem the tables above do not solve, because a day's play in Asia or Australia straddles two American dates.
A Test in India starting at 9.30am local begins at 04.00 UTC. That is 11.00pm the previous evening on the American east coast and 8.00pm the previous evening on the west coast. The whole first session belongs to the American night before the date printed on the scorecard. By the time the day's play ends, at around 5.00pm in India, it is 7.30am Eastern on the date the match is officially being played.
The consequence for anyone recording or streaming is that a "day three" broadcast is spread across two of your own calendar days, and search results, highlights packages and social media will refer to it by the host country's date. This is worth knowing before you set a recording and find you have captured the wrong session.
Australian Tests are worse in this respect and better in another. A Brisbane or Melbourne Test starting at 10.00am local in December begins around 7.00pm the previous evening on the American east coast — which is genuinely convenient, because the first two sessions land in American prime time. The difference between the formats and why session structure matters is set out in the guide to Test, ODI and T20 differences.
Day-night Tests, which start in the afternoon local time and finish under lights, shift the whole day later and generally push the play further into the American morning rather than the night.
The fixtures that are already on American time
Not all of this is inconvenience. A growing share of serious cricket is now played in American time zones, and that is a genuine change in the last few years.
Major League Cricket runs through the American summer at venues in Texas, California, Florida and North Carolina, with evening starts under lights, which means matches in domestic prime time — the competition is explained in Major League Cricket explained. The 2024 men's T20 World Cup was partly staged here, with matches scheduled around both Caribbean and American audiences, as described in the guide to the 2024 T20 World Cup in the USA. Caribbean franchise cricket sits one hour ahead of the American east coast in summer and does not change its clocks.
The next significant shift is 2028, when the Olympic cricket tournament is played in southern California in the second half of July. For the first time, the sport's highest-profile competition will be scheduled around a Pacific-time audience. That is covered in the guide to cricket at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
Habits that make this manageable
A few practical points, learned the hard way by anyone who follows overseas cricket from here.
- Put fixtures in your calendar as calendar entries rather than remembering them. Any calendar application will convert a start time correctly if you enter it with the host city's time zone attached, and it will handle the daylight saving mismatches automatically.
- Add a second clock to your phone for the country you follow most. It removes the arithmetic entirely and it catches the March and October discontinuities without you having to think about them.
- Check start times again in the week a competition begins, because boards move fixtures and the published schedule at the time of the draw is not always the final one.
- For multi-day cricket, work out which session you actually want. Trying to watch a full day of a Test from another hemisphere is a commitment; picking the session where the match is likely to turn is a habit.
- Remember that a scorecard's date is the host country's date. Searching for a result using your own date will sometimes find nothing.
Once the offsets are internalised the conversion takes a second, and the payoff is a sport that is on somewhere at almost any hour. The rest of the American game — where to play it, where to watch it in person and how it is organised — is collected on the cricket in the USA hub, and the related question of how scoring-based games handle these schedules is covered in the guide to fantasy cricket.
Sources and method
Time zone offsets and daylight saving dates in this guide are taken from published national standards: the United States' second-Sunday-in-March to first-Sunday-in-November arrangement and its list of non-observing states and territories, British Summer Time running from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October, Australian daylight saving in New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, the ACT and South Australia running from the first Sunday in October to the first Sunday in April with Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory not participating, New Zealand's last-Sunday-in-September to first-Sunday-in-April arrangement, and the fixed year-round offsets used by India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the United Arab Emirates and South Africa. Match start times are given as the customary published times for those competitions and are illustrative: boards revise start times between seasons and individual fixtures are frequently moved, so any specific match should be checked against the official schedule. No figure here is computed from our own datasets.