BTC/USD market hours: when BTCUSD actually moves
34,957 fifteen-minute bars of BTCUSD from the last 12 months, 2025-08 to 2026-08, sorted by the hour they belong to. No forecast and no advice — just how far this market has tended to travel at each hour of the day, and how often it has done something far out of the ordinary.
Which forex session is open right now — and this market trades whether they are or not
Each session below is given in its own city's clock, which is the one statement that stays true all year — the UTC equivalent shifts twice a year, and the four cities do not shift on the same weekend. Which of them is open at this moment needs JavaScript, and this page will say so rather than guess.
- Sydney08:00–17:00 Sydney—
- Tokyo09:00–18:00 Tokyo—
- London08:00–17:00 London—
- New York08:00–17:00 New York—
The tables below give the same measurement for every hour of the day.
What time does BTC/USD open and close?
BTC/USD never closes. Unlike the currency pairs on this site it has no weekly open and no weekly close: it trades through Saturday and Sunday, and 19% of its measured movement happens at the weekend. There is no opening bell to wait for, which makes the only useful question the one the rest of this page answers — not when it opens, but when it moves.
Knowing the market is open is the easy half. The rest of this page is the other one: which of those hours BTCUSD actually moves in, measured over 365 days.
Every hour below is shown in UTC. Turn on JavaScript and the page will convert them to your own timezone.
Busiest and quietest hours for BTC/USD, by measured range
Each bar is the median distance between the high and the low of a fifteen-minute candle at that hour, in dollars. The median rather than the average, because a handful of violent bars would drag an average upwards and describe an hour nobody has ever traded.
These hourly figures as a table
| Hour (UTC) | Median 15-minute range |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | 214 dollars |
| 01:00 | 227 dollars |
| 02:00 | 214 dollars |
| 03:00 | 189 dollars |
| 04:00 | 178 dollars |
| 05:00 | 176 dollars |
| 06:00 | 175 dollars |
| 07:00 | 176 dollars |
| 08:00 | 190 dollars |
| 09:00 | 182 dollars |
| 10:00 | 174 dollars |
| 11:00 | 173 dollars |
| 12:00 | 201 dollars |
| 13:00 | 262 dollars |
| 14:00 | 327 dollars |
| 15:00 | 316 dollars |
| 16:00 | 286 dollars |
| 17:00 | 261 dollars |
| 18:00 | 231 dollars |
| 19:00 | 222 dollars |
| 20:00 | 205 dollars |
| 21:00 | 190 dollars |
| 22:00 | 200 dollars |
| 23:00 | 188 dollars |
The busiest hour is 14:00 UTC at 327 dollars; the quietest hour is 11:00 UTC at 173 dollars. That is a spread of 1.9× between the liveliest and the deadest hour of this market's day.
The best time to trade BTC/USD: volatility by hour and weekday
The same measurement, split by day of the week. Darker is a larger median fifteen-minute range. Blank cells are hours with too little data to publish. Unlike the currency pairs here, this market does not close at the weekend, so Saturday and Sunday are ordinary trading days and both appear in the grid. This grid is not converted, and neither is the session table or either spike table below it — each keeps the clock its heading names: shifting a weekday grid is exact, but it moves late Monday hours into Tuesday, and a table that quietly rotates its own columns is harder to trust than one that names its clock.
The weekday grid as a table
| Hour (UTC) | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 00:00 | 338 | 241 | 228 | 226 | 216 | 137 | 148 |
| 01:00 | 314 | 249 | 241 | 252 | 239 | 133 | 153 |
| 02:00 | 281 | 228 | 222 | 240 | 230 | 130 | 150 |
| 03:00 | 226 | 206 | 193 | 217 | 209 | 133 | 130 |
| 04:00 | 205 | 199 | 192 | 195 | 193 | 126 | 128 |
| 05:00 | 209 | 203 | 191 | 193 | 188 | 124 | 129 |
| 06:00 | 210 | 203 | 188 | 195 | 192 | 119 | 129 |
| 07:00 | 205 | 198 | 189 | 185 | 197 | 124 | 128 |
| 08:00 | 218 | 212 | 207 | 210 | 217 | 139 | 138 |
| 09:00 | 212 | 204 | 188 | 191 | 204 | 125 | 147 |
| 10:00 | 184 | 192 | 183 | 192 | 184 | 128 | 148 |
| 11:00 | 203 | 189 | 178 | 180 | 187 | 123 | 142 |
| 12:00 | 226 | 204 | 240 | 234 | 222 | 128 | 159 |
| 13:00 | 300 | 283 | 307 | 315 | 310 | 146 | 163 |
| 14:00 | 376 | 415 | 377 | 380 | 431 | 132 | 192 |
| 15:00 | 376 | 402 | 384 | 421 | 420 | 160 | 176 |
| 16:00 | 313 | 336 | 342 | 327 | 350 | 163 | 165 |
| 17:00 | 303 | 312 | 305 | 322 | 306 | 142 | 161 |
| 18:00 | 248 | 286 | 282 | 293 | 276 | 131 | 143 |
| 19:00 | 247 | 251 | 280 | 264 | 241 | 126 | 168 |
| 20:00 | 223 | 239 | 268 | 242 | 229 | 120 | 164 |
| 21:00 | 204 | 219 | 230 | 193 | 189 | 143 | 173 |
| 22:00 | 202 | 220 | 225 | 194 | 174 | 138 | 265 |
| 23:00 | 196 | 204 | 202 | 193 | 136 | 122 | 282 |
Which BTC/USD session carries the movement
Sessions overlap and are not equal in length, so the last column is the one worth reading: how much of the market's total measured travel happens in an average hour of that session.
| Session (UTC) | Hours with data | Share of all travel | Per hour |
|---|---|---|---|
| 00:00–07:00 | 7 | 26.6% | 3.81% |
| 07:00–12:00 | 5 | 17.3% | 3.47% |
| 12:00–16:00 | 4 | 21.5% | 5.36% ← densest |
| 16:00–21:00 | 5 | 23.4% | 4.67% |
| 21:00–24:00 | 3 | 11.2% | 3.73% |
An average hour of 12:00–16:00 UTC carries 1.5 times as much of BTC/USD's measured movement as an average hour of 07:00–12:00 UTC.
Share is computed from the hourly medians above, so it describes a typical hour rather than the sum of every bar — one violent afternoon does not move it.
BTC/USD hours that go wrong: where the outsized bars cluster
A spike here means a fifteen-minute bar more than three times the median for its own weekday and hour, after each bar has been measured against the preceding month rather than against the whole period — so a market that has simply grown more volatile does not report its recent weeks as one long anomaly. From 2025-08 to 2026-08 these slots produced the most.
| Slot (UTC) | Bars over 3× | Largest | When |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fri 23:00 | 20 | 1844 dollars (14.5×) | 2025-10-10 |
| Sat 07:00 | 20 | 1130 dollars (6.8×) | 2026-02-07 |
| Sat 00:00 | 16 | 928 dollars (7.0×) | 2025-10-11 |
| Sun 15:00 | 16 | 1266 dollars (7.5×) | 2025-10-12 |
| Fri 12:00 | 15 | 2102 dollars (6.3×) | 2025-11-21 |
| Sat 04:00 | 15 | 1025 dollars (8.2×) | 2025-10-11 |
The same bars, grouped by New York time. Where a cluster is tighter on one clock than the other, the slot moves with US daylight saving rather than staying fixed in UTC. For this instrument the UTC grid is the tighter of the two: its busiest slot holds 20 outsized bars against 19 in New York.
| Slot (New York) | Bars over 3× | Largest | When |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fri 19:00 | 19 | 1844 dollars (14.6×) | 2025-10-10 |
| Sat 03:00 | 19 | 1108 dollars (8.3×) | 2025-10-11 |
| Sat 02:00 | 17 | 1130 dollars (7.1×) | 2026-02-07 |
| Sun 17:00 | 16 | 1319 dollars (6.4×) | 2026-02-01 |
| Fri 18:00 | 15 | 2183 dollars (14.4×) | 2025-10-10 |
| Sat 00:00 | 14 | 1025 dollars (8.3×) | 2025-10-11 |
The largest single fifteen-minute bar in the period was 5602 dollars on 2025-10-10 (Fri 21:00 UTC) — 29.6× the median bar for that UTC slot. (The New York table grades the same bar against its New York slot, which has a different median, so the two multiples differ.)
Measured from 34,957 M15 bars on one broker's live feed, 2025-08 to 2026-08. This is a description of the past, not a prediction and not a recommendation: nothing here says when to trade, what to trade, or which way. Hours are measured and published in UTC. Unless you have switched the clock above back to UTC they are restated here in your own zone, using your offset as it stands today — so hours from before your last daylight-saving change read an hour out. The weekday grid, the session table and the two spike tables are not converted at all — each keeps the clock named in its own heading.
Turnmarks is chart analytics, not advice. Trading carries risk, including the loss of your capital.
The feed's clock was checked against the FX week on the same feed: 149/162 weekly closes land on the New York 17:00 bell (92%), checked on EURUSD.
What Turnmarks does with BTC/USD
Turnmarks watches this market on the hourly chart and marks the bar where a push stops going anywhere. It does not tell you to buy or sell, and it is not a signals group. Every past marker's outcome is measured and published on the BTC/USD page, so you can judge it before paying for anything. There is a free plan and it needs no card.
Market hours for the other instruments
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