Current time in Birmingham, United States
The current local time in Birmingham is shown below. Birmingham observes CST in winter and CDT during daylight saving time.
Daylight saving time
Sunrise & sunset today
Timezone facts
Birmingham in context
Birmingham sits in the Jones Valley between two ridges of the southern Appalachians in north-central Alabama, around 90 kilometres south of the Tennessee border. The city proper holds around 197,000 residents, with the wider metropolitan area extending to around 1.1 million across central Alabama. Founded as an iron and steel town in 1871, it remains visibly shaped by 19th-century industrial geography, with rail lines and former blast-furnace sites still defining downtown boundaries.
Timezone history of Birmingham
Birmingham uses Central Time, one hour behind the eastern seaboard and one hour ahead of the western Mountain states. The Alabama-Georgia border, around 200 kilometres east, produces the change to Eastern Time, so Birmingham residents routinely operate across a one-hour difference with Atlanta for business meetings. Federal DST rules apply.
Working hours in Birmingham
Birmingham's working day runs 08:00 to 17:00, with the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and its associated hospital system as the dominant single employer in the metro area. Banking and law firms downtown keep conventional Central Time hours. The city has retained a strong concentration of healthcare and biotechnology employers that grew up around UAB Medicine, producing a higher proportion of around-the-clock shift work than other Southern cities of similar size.