Convert EST (Eastern Standard Time) to BST (British Summer Time)

Which BST is this?

BST names more than one zone. This page reads it as British Summer Time at UTC+1, which is the reading most converters take. There is one other: Bangladesh Standard Time at UTC+6, used in Bangladesh, all year.

The letters on a meeting invitation do not say which one is meant. If yours is not British Summer Time, the answer above is wrong, and not by a little:

Any converter has to pick one of these readings before it can answer, and two of them can pick differently — a page of search results for a BST conversion can show you both answers with neither being wrong. The one to trust is whichever states the zone it means rather than only the letters. Where it matters, ask which country the sender is in.

Best time to schedule a meeting

Standard 9–5 working hours overlap for 2 hours: 9:00 AM–11:00 AM EST (3:00 PM–5:00 PM BST). Schedule meetings inside that window.

EST to BST conversion table

About EST

Eastern Standard Time (EST) is UTC−5. It is used in New York, Toronto, Miami and Atlanta in winter.

Eastern Standard Time is UTC−5 and applies in New York, Toronto, Miami and Atlanta only from November to March. For the other eight months those cities are on EDT, UTC−4. Americans routinely write "EST" year-round to mean "east coast time", so a date given as EST in July is usually meant as EDT and is an hour earlier than written — one of the most common scheduling errors there is. Note also that Panama and Jamaica are on UTC−5 all year and never switch.

About BST

British Summer Time (BST) is UTC+1. It is used in the UK from late March to late October.

British Summer Time is UTC+1, in force in the UK and Ireland from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October. The abbreviation is ambiguous: BST also means Bangladesh Standard Time, UTC+6, five hours away. Within the UK it is the reason "GMT" is wrong for most of the year — the clocks are on BST from spring to autumn, and only the winter half of the year is actually GMT.

Does this gap change with the seasons?

This gap is seasonal. The abbreviations themselves are fixed offsets, but the region on EST switches to EDT (UTC−4) from March to November, and the region on BST switches to GMT (UTC+0) from late October to late March. So the 6-hour figure on this page is correct for the part of the year when both places are actually on these abbreviations, and changes by an hour outside it.

Because both sides shift, there are also short windows each spring and autumn when one has changed and the other has not — the two regions do not switch on the same date. A recurring meeting set during one of those windows is an hour out for a week or two, which is the most common way this catches people.

This is the reason scheduling systems store an IANA zone such as Region/City rather than an offset or an abbreviation: the zone knows its own rules and the offset does not.

Frequently asked questions