City comparison · time difference and converter
Los Angeles vs New York time difference and converter
New York is 3 hours ahead of Los Angeles right now. Los Angeles sits in United States on Los Angeles; New York sits in United States on New York. They are roughly 3,936 km apart (2,446 mi), a flight of about 5h 38m. Los Angeles's metro holds around 13.2 million people; New York's around 19.5 million.
Los Angeles
New York
Best meeting times today
Open converter →Slot 1
09:00 / 12:00
Los Angeles / New York
Both inside business hoursSlot 2
10:00 / 13:00
Los Angeles / New York
Both inside business hoursSlot 3
11:00 / 14:00
Los Angeles / New York
Both inside business hours24-hour comparison heatmap
Each row is one hour in Los Angeles. Green rows are inside business hours in both cities; amber means only one side is at their desk; grey rows fall outside business hours in both.
Public holidays in November 2026
Veterans Day
United States
Wed, Nov 11
Thanksgiving Day
United States
Thu, Nov 26
Travel context
Great-circle distance
3,936 km
(2,446 mi)
Approximate flight
5h 38m
850 km/h cruise + 1h taxi/climb/descent
Jet lag
3h
Roughly 1 day to adjust per timezone crossed
Convert any specific time
The heatmap gives you the shape of the day. If you need to convert one specific hour, say a customer call or a release window, open the converter with both cities already loaded.
Open in converter →Frequently asked questions
Working between Los Angeles and New York
The difference between Los Angeles and New York is not really a number, it's a daily rhythm. New York is 3 hours ahead of Los Angeles on the clock today, but the lived version is that New York is wrapping up the working day while Los Angeles is still in the morning, and the overlap people actually use is narrow. That gap, more than the raw offset, is what teams have to design around.
In Los Angeles, the working day picks up earliest in the financial districts- Los Angeles's downtown core wakes early and breaks for lunch at the usual hour. The mood in New York is its own story: Midtown subways are jammed by 08:30 and the bars near Bryant Park spill out at 18:00. If you are scheduling between the two, the heatmap above marks the rows where both patterns line up.
Daylight saving is the other thing to keep an eye on. United States shifts the clock on the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday of November; United States shifts on the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday of November. When the two changes are weeks apart, the offset between Los Angeles and New York is one hour off the usual for that stretch, a cliff that catches recurring calendar invites unless your calendar app rebases them automatically. Pin the meeting to a city, not an offset, and the tool handles the rest.
For travellers, the 5h 38m flight is the short version of the story. The longer one is jet lag: roughly one day of adjustment per timezone crossed, which means a trip across the 3-hour gap costs about 3 groggy days on each side. Pilots and cabin crew swear by morning sunlight and an early walk; whatever your routine, the wall-clock numbers above are the source of truth for your first morning in the new city.