US Map / Time Zones / Pacific Time
Pacific Time Zone Map
Only California and Washington are Pacific from border to border. Three more states are split, one of them over a single town.
Only two states are entirely on Pacific Time
California and Washington. That is the whole list of states with no Pacific-zone exception anywhere inside them, which surprises people who assume the west coast is uniform. Oregon and Nevada are mostly Pacific but each hand a piece to Mountain Time, and Idaho is mostly Mountain but hands its northern panhandle to Pacific.
Add up only the Pacific-zone parts of those five states and you get about 55 million people in 2024, roughly 16 percent of the country. That makes Pacific the third-largest US zone by population, behind Eastern and Central and well ahead of Mountain.
The three exceptions
Oregon's Malheur County, in the far southeast, runs on Mountain Time. Its business is with Boise, twenty minutes away across the Snake River, not with Portland five hours west. Nevada has a single Mountain-time community, West Wendover, sitting on the Utah border and functionally a suburb of the Salt Lake City market; the rest of the state, including Las Vegas and Reno, is Pacific. In the other direction, Idaho splits at the Salmon River, and everything north of it — Coeur d'Alene, Moscow, Lewiston, and the rest of the panhandle — keeps Pacific Time to match Spokane, Washington.
UTC offset: PST and PDT
| Standard time (PST) | UTC−8 |
| Daylight time (PDT) | UTC−7 |
| Clocks forward | 2:00 a.m. on the second Sunday in March |
| Clocks back | 2:00 a.m. on the first Sunday in November |
| States wholly in the zone | California and Washington |
| States partly in the zone | Idaho, Nevada, Oregon |
The whole Pacific zone observes daylight saving, on the same March and November Sundays as the rest of the country. One practical consequence: for about eight months of the year Pacific Daylight Time and Arizona's year-round Mountain Standard Time are the same clock, so a meeting set from Phoenix in July needs no conversion for Los Angeles but does for Denver. California has repeatedly voted and legislated toward permanent daylight saving time, but no state can adopt it without an act of Congress; states may only opt out of daylight saving entirely, as Arizona and Hawaii have.
Cities on Pacific Time
Los Angeles is the largest, then San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, Las Vegas, Portland, Fresno, Sacramento, Long Beach, and Oakland. Every one of them is in the Pacific division except Las Vegas, which belongs to Mountain — a reminder that Census divisions and time zones are drawn for different reasons.
Neighboring zones
Inland is Mountain Time, then Central and Eastern; northwest across the Gulf of Alaska is Alaska Time, one hour behind, and further out Hawaii–Aleutian. All six are on the US time zones map.