Convert PST (Pacific Standard Time) to KST (Korea Standard Time)

Best time to schedule a meeting

Standard 9–5 working hours do not overlap at all between PST and KST. Someone has to take an early or late call — or use asynchronous communication instead.

PST to KST conversion table

About PST

Pacific Standard Time (PST) is UTC−8. It is used in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Vancouver in winter.

Pacific Standard Time is UTC−8, used by Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Vancouver from November to March. As with EST, the abbreviation is written all year in practice — a great deal of software, and most conference invitations from the US west coast, say PST when the sender means PDT. If a time from a US source looks an hour off between March and November, this is almost always why.

About KST

Korea Standard Time (KST) is UTC+9. It is used in South Korea, with no daylight saving.

Korea Standard Time is UTC+9, the same as Japan, and South Korea has had no daylight saving since 1988 when it was used for the Seoul Olympics. The two Koreas briefly differed: the North moved to UTC+8:30 in 2015 and returned to UTC+9 in 2018, which is the only time in modern history the peninsula ran on two clocks.

Does this gap change with the seasons?

This gap is seasonal. The abbreviations themselves are fixed offsets, but the region on PST switches to PDT (UTC−7) from March to November. So the 17-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.

KST does not shift, so the whole change comes from one side. A recurring meeting fixed in KST will appear to move by an hour for everyone on the other side, twice a year, without anyone changing anything.

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