Current EDT Time

Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)

EDT (Eastern Daylight Time) is UTC-4:00, active from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November in eastern US and Canadian states. During winter the same region reverts to EST (UTC-5). The IANA timezone America/New_York covers both EST and EDT automatically based on date.

Where Eastern Daylight Time is observed

EDT (UTC−4) is the summer-time variant of US/Canada Eastern Time, active from the second Sunday of March through the first Sunday of November. Same cities as EST: New York, Washington D.C., Toronto, Montréal, Atlanta, Boston, Miami.

• Used wherever America/New_York is observed during DST months
• A timestamp labeled EDT in November or February is almost certainly mislabeled
• Indiana, Michigan, and most of Kentucky also follow EDT in summer

EDT vs EST

EDT and EST differ only by one hour, but a value carrying the wrong abbreviation will be off by an hour for the entire wrong half of the year. Store moments as Unix timestamps (UTC) and only attach EDT or EST when displaying; never store the abbreviation as a substitute for an IANA timezone.

• EDT = UTC−4, EST = UTC−5
• America/New_York automatically returns whichever applies for a given instant
• EDT is observed from second Sunday in March to first Sunday in November

EDT and Unix epoch — conversion examples

Converting a wall-clock time in EDT to a Unix timestamp means subtracting four hours from UTC. For example, 2026-07-04 12:00:00 EDT corresponds to 2026-07-04 16:00:00 UTC, which is 1783180800 seconds since the epoch. Going the other way, a stored epoch needs the EDT offset applied to get the local clock value users expect to read on a clock face during US summer months.

• 2026-03-08 02:00 EDT — spring-forward boundary, the wall clock skips to 03:00
• 2026-11-01 02:00 EST — fall-back boundary, EDT ends and EST resumes
• EDT epoch = UTC epoch − 14400 (because EDT is UTC − 4 hours)
• Java: ZonedDateTime.of(2026,7,4,12,0,0,0, ZoneId.of("America/New_York")).toEpochSecond()
• Python: ZoneInfo('America/New_York') reports EDT for July; EST for January

Common EDT bugs in production code

Most EDT bugs come from one of three places: a server that runs in UTC but logs in EDT for display, a CSV import that strips the timezone tag, or a cron job that compares 'today in EDT' against a UTC midnight. The DST transitions also break naive date math — adding 86400 seconds to an epoch may not be exactly one wall-clock day in EDT around the transition weekends in March and November.

• Use IANA zone 'America/New_York' rather than a fixed UTC−4 offset, so DST flips automatically
• Avoid storing 'EDT' or 'EST' as strings — store the IANA zone and the UTC instant
• When summarizing by day, decide whether the day boundary is UTC or EDT before grouping
• Spring-forward removes an hour; fall-back repeats one — both can break SUM/AVG over time windows