Central Daylight Time is UTC−05:00, the summer offset for the North American Central Time zone.
Detecting your timezone for a personal comparison…
Now
CDT is the daylight-saving setting of America/Chicago. During CDT, Chicago lines up with Eastern Standard Time’s winter offset, which is a common source of meeting-time mistakes. Use this page to confirm whether Central Time has already sprung forward.
The offset shown above is computed from America/Chicago at page render time using Intl.DateTimeFormat. It can change when daylight saving starts or ends.
When daylight saving ends, Central Time returns to CST (UTC−06:00).
Central Daylight Time (CDT) uses the IANA identifier America/Chicago. Central Daylight Time is UTC−05:00, the summer offset for the North American Central Time zone.
Right now Central Daylight Time is UTC-05:00. The live abbreviation reported by the timezone database is CDT.
Daylight saving time is in effect. Standard time is labeled CST and daylight time is labeled CDT. Dates are taken from IANA data, not hardcoded on this site.
Use the converter with America/Chicago as the source zone, or open the Time Zone Converter and pick a city that uses CDT. Offsets update automatically when daylight saving begins or ends.