City comparison · time difference and converter
New York is 5 hours behind London right now. London sits in United Kingdom on London; New York sits in United States on New York. They are roughly 5,570 km apart (3,461 mi), a flight of about 7h 33m. London's metro holds around 9.5 million people; New York's around 19.5 million.
Slot 1
14:00 / 09:00
London / New York
Both inside business hoursSlot 2
15:00 / 10:00
London / New York
Both inside business hoursSlot 3
16:00 / 11:00
London / New York
Both inside business hoursEach row is one hour in London. 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.
Juneteenth
New York, United States
Fri, Jun 19
Great-circle distance
5,570 km
(3,461 mi)
Approximate flight
7h 33m
850 km/h cruise + 1h taxi/climb/descent
Jet lag
5h
Roughly 1 day to adjust per timezone crossed
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 →London and New York are the default transatlantic pairing for finance, media, law, consulting, and software teams. The useful overlap is not the whole day; it is the London afternoon and the New York morning. A 2 PM London call lands at 9 AM New York during the normal five-hour gap, which gives London enough day left to act on decisions and lets New York start with context instead of a cold handoff.
The dependable shared window is roughly 1 PM to 5 PM in London, which maps to 8 AM to noon in New York for much of the year.
Use 2 PM London / 9 AM New York as the default for recurring calls. Push to 3 PM London for workshops that need New York fully online. Avoid late-London slots for routine work: once London is past 5 PM, action usually waits until the next UK morning. Around March and October DST transition weeks, confirm the exact calendar date because the gap briefly changes.
The London Stock Exchange closes before New York's cash session ends, so market, legal, and communications teams often use this corridor for same-day approvals. For async work, London should send end-of-day notes before New York lunch so the US team can respond before Europe returns.
The difference between London and New York is not really a number, it's a daily rhythm. New York is 5 hours behind London on the clock today, but the lived version is that London is ahead in the calendar, so by the time New York comes online, half of London's day is already gone. That gap, more than the raw offset, is what teams have to design around.
In London, the working day picks up earliest in the financial districts — City of London desks switch on by 07:30 for the European open. 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 Kingdom shifts the clock on the last Sunday of March and October; 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 London 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 7h 33m 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 5-hour gap costs about 5 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.