Current time in Los Angeles, United States
The current local time in Los Angeles is shown below. Los Angeles observes PST in winter and PDT during daylight saving time.
Daylight saving time
Sunrise & sunset today
Timezone facts
Los Angeles in context
Los Angeles sprawls across the Los Angeles Basin in southern California, hemmed in by the Pacific Ocean to the west and the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains inland. The city proper holds around 3.9 million residents, but the wider Los Angeles–Long Beach metropolitan area extends north into Ventura County and east into the Inland Empire, with a combined population of around 13 million. Distinct from New York or Chicago, the urban form is low-rise and freeway-dominated rather than centred on a single dense core.
Timezone history of Los Angeles
Pacific Standard Time places Los Angeles three hours behind New York and a full eight hours behind UTC in winter, with the same one-hour summer shift applied to daylight saving. The relationship with the eastern timezones is structurally important to the city's industries: Hollywood film and television release windows, sports broadcasts, and live programming routinely anchor to East Coast schedules and play back later locally. Daylight saving begins at 02:00 on the second Sunday of March, regardless of how late entertainment-industry workers are still up.
Working hours in Los Angeles
Working hours in Los Angeles vary more by sector than by city norm. Film and television studios operate to per-production schedules that can begin at dawn or extend overnight, while the tech corridor along the coast and aerospace sector to the south keep more conventional 09:00 to 18:00 days. Heavy traffic on the freeway network shapes commute timing significantly, with many workplaces shifting to flexible hours to spread the load. Federal holidays apply, alongside film-industry closures around the awards season in late January and February.