SPX500 market hours: when the S&P 500 index actually moves
22,723 fifteen-minute bars of the S&P 500 index 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 — these are the currency market's hours, not this instrument's own
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 SPX500 open and close?
SPX500 is a contract on the CME E-mini S&P 500 future (ES), and the future is where its price is made. On CME Globex that contract trades from Sunday 17:00 in Chicago until Friday 16:00 in Chicago — 18:00 to 17:00 in New York — and stops every day for a sixty-minute maintenance break at 16:00 Chicago time. That is the exchange's own schedule, published by CME Group in US Central time; it is the one paragraph on this page not measured from the bars below.
The tables below are measured from this broker's SPX500 bars rather than from the exchange's, and here the two do not agree. 20:00, 21:00 and 22:00 UTC fall short of a full hour of trading in the measurement, and the exchange's sixty-minute break can only account for two of them. The rest — 20:00 UTC — is the broker's: its SPX500 contract stops before CME Globex does, so the last part of the futures afternoon has no bars on this page at all, and the hours around it are thinner here than the market itself was. Every other hour of the week runs straight through.
SPX500 opens the week busier than its own average hour: 6.3 points per 15-minute bar in the first hours of the trading week — the Sunday evening cells of the grid below — against 12.1 at its busiest and 5.5 in a typical hour. Walking the clock forward from there, its range across the week does not reach a typical hour until 00:00 UTC.
Chicago hours on purpose. In UTC that daily break is 21:00 to 22:00 while the United States is on daylight time and 22:00 to 23:00 for the rest of the year, and the week opens at 22:00 on Sunday for part of the year and 23:00 for the rest — because Chicago changes its clocks and UTC does not, so any page giving you one fixed UTC time for it is wrong for months at a stretch. Europe does not change on the same weekend as the United States either: for about three weeks each March and one each late October, the usual conversion between a European clock and Chicago's is an hour out.
A future is a series rather than a single instrument — the ES contract expires every quarter and is replaced by the next one. The bars below are the broker's continuous SPX500 series, not any one contract, so nothing on this page describes what happens at a rollover.
Knowing the market is open is the easy half. The rest of this page is the other one: which of those hours the S&P 500 index actually moves in, measured over 312 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 SPX500, by measured range
Each bar is the median distance between the high and the low of a fifteen-minute candle at that hour, in points. 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 | 5.5 points |
| 01:00 | 5.0 points |
| 02:00 | 4.0 points |
| 03:00 | 3.6 points |
| 04:00 | 3.3 points |
| 05:00 | 3.8 points |
| 06:00 | 4.5 points |
| 07:00 | 5.0 points |
| 08:00 | 5.9 points |
| 09:00 | 5.0 points |
| 10:00 | 4.7 points |
| 11:00 | 5.3 points |
| 12:00 | 6.5 points |
| 13:00 | 8.8 points |
| 14:00 | 12.1 points |
| 15:00 | 11.9 points |
| 16:00 | 9.6 points |
| 17:00 | 8.7 points |
| 18:00 | 7.7 points |
| 19:00 | 8.6 points |
| 20:00 | 9.5 points |
| 21:00 | 7.3 points |
| 22:00 | 4.5 points |
| 23:00 | 4.6 points |
The busiest hour is 14:00 UTC at 12.1 points; the quietest hour is 04:00 UTC at 3.3 points. That is a spread of 3.7× between the liveliest and the deadest hour of this market's day. There are no bars here for part of 20:00, 21:00 and 22:00 UTC, so those hours are charted but left out of the busiest and quietest comparison.
The best time to trade SPX500: 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 the market was closed. 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 | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 00:00 | 6.5 | 5.2 | 4.8 | 5.8 | 5.3 | — |
| 01:00 | 5.5 | 4.8 | 4.4 | 5.4 | 4.7 | — |
| 02:00 | 4.0 | 4.2 | 3.3 | 4.7 | 4.0 | — |
| 03:00 | 3.7 | 3.5 | 3.3 | 4.3 | 3.6 | — |
| 04:00 | 3.3 | 3.2 | 2.8 | 4.0 | 3.4 | — |
| 05:00 | 3.5 | 4.0 | 3.5 | 4.2 | 3.5 | — |
| 06:00 | 4.3 | 4.5 | 4.1 | 5.0 | 4.3 | — |
| 07:00 | 5.1 | 5.0 | 4.5 | 5.3 | 5.0 | — |
| 08:00 | 6.1 | 5.8 | 5.3 | 6.2 | 5.5 | — |
| 09:00 | 4.6 | 4.8 | 5.0 | 5.4 | 5.5 | — |
| 10:00 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.7 | 5.0 | 4.5 | — |
| 11:00 | 4.9 | 5.0 | 4.8 | 5.7 | 5.5 | — |
| 12:00 | 5.8 | 6.3 | 6.5 | 6.9 | 7.2 | — |
| 13:00 | 7.7 | 8.1 | 9.0 | 9.3 | 9.7 | — |
| 14:00 | 11.1 | 12.5 | 11.8 | 13.1 | 12.2 | — |
| 15:00 | 10.1 | 11.1 | 11.2 | 14.9 | 13.8 | — |
| 16:00 | 8.1 | 9.2 | 9.3 | 10.6 | 10.7 | — |
| 17:00 | 7.5 | 8.8 | 8.3 | 10.0 | 10.0 | — |
| 18:00 | 6.5 | 7.0 | 7.5 | 9.2 | 8.8 | — |
| 19:00 | 7.1 | 8.1 | 8.9 | 9.3 | 9.0 | — |
| 20:00 | 7.6 | 8.7 | 10.1 | 10.3 | 10.6 | — |
| 21:00 | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| 22:00 | 3.7 | 4.2 | 5.0 | 4.1 | — | 6.1 |
| 23:00 | 4.0 | 4.2 | 5.0 | 4.3 | — | 6.3 |
Which SPX500 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asian hours 00–07 | 7 | 19.1% | 2.73% |
| London 07–12 | 5 | 16.7% | 3.33% |
| London and New York overlap 12–16 | 4 | 25.3% | 6.32% ← densest |
| New York 16–21 | 5 | 28.4% | 5.67% |
| Late New York 21–24 | 3 | 10.6% | 3.52% |
An average hour of the London–New York overlap carries 2.3 times as much of SPX500's measured movement as an average hour of the Asian hours.
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.
SPX500 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sun 23:00 | 19 | 29.5 points (3.6×) | 2026-03-15 |
| Wed 19:00 | 16 | 58.4 points (8.6×) | 2025-10-29 |
| Wed 18:00 | 14 | 74.4 points (7.8×) | 2026-06-17 |
| Wed 17:00 | 14 | 43.2 points (8.0×) | 2025-10-15 |
| Tue 10:00 | 13 | 25.7 points (3.2×) | 2026-04-07 |
| Tue 23:00 | 13 | 24.4 points (3.4×) | 2026-04-07 |
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 19 outsized bars against 17 in New York.
| Slot (New York) | Bars over 3× | Largest | When |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wed 14:00 | 17 | 74.4 points (7.7×) | 2026-06-17 |
| Tue 03:00 | 13 | 27.2 points (7.5×) | 2025-10-14 |
| Tue 06:00 | 13 | 26.3 points (4.8×) | 2026-03-03 |
| Wed 13:00 | 13 | 43.2 points (8.2×) | 2025-10-15 |
| Wed 18:00 | 12 | 40.0 points (6.2×) | 2026-07-29 |
| Tue 09:00 | 12 | 48.8 points (4.3×) | 2026-02-17 |
The largest single fifteen-minute bar in the period was 240 points on 2026-03-23 (Mon 12:00 UTC) — 41.5× 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 22,723 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 this market's own week: 149/162 weekly closes land on the New York 17:00 bell (92%), checked on EURUSD.
What Turnmarks does with SPX500
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 SPX500 page, so you can judge it before paying for anything. There is a free plan and it needs no card.
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