BITCOIN EXCHANGE TRADING HOURS
When is the Bitcoin market busiest?
Which hours of the day the exchanges actually trade, and which half of the day carries the bigger moves.
Bitcoin traded by hour of the UTC day, last 90 days
Bitcoin traded by hour of the UTC day, last 90 days. 00:00 UTC, 74.4K BTC, 3.7% of the day. 01:00 UTC, 76.2K BTC, 3.8% of the day. 02:00 UTC, 70.3K BTC, 3.5% of the day. 03:00 UTC, 56.4K BTC, 2.8% of the day. 04:00 UTC, 53.4K BTC, 2.6% of the day. 05:00 UTC, 67.6K BTC, 3.3% of the day. 06:00 UTC, 61.9K BTC, 3.1% of the day. 07:00 UTC, 88.7K BTC, 4.4% of the day. 08:00 UTC, 97.5K BTC, 4.8% of the day. 09:00 UTC, 89.5K BTC, 4.4% of the day. 10:00 UTC, 59.5K BTC, 2.9% of the day. 11:00 UTC, 60.4K BTC, 3.0% of the day. 12:00 UTC, 104.7K BTC, 5.2% of the day. 13:00 UTC, 151.1K BTC, 7.5% of the day. 14:00 UTC, 157.8K BTC, 7.8% of the day. 15:00 UTC, 157.3K BTC, 7.8% of the day. 16:00 UTC, 112.5K BTC, 5.5% of the day. 17:00 UTC, 91.3K BTC, 4.5% of the day. 18:00 UTC, 78.7K BTC, 3.9% of the day. 19:00 UTC, 73.5K BTC, 3.6% of the day. 20:00 UTC, 58.0K BTC, 2.9% of the day. 21:00 UTC, 63.5K BTC, 3.1% of the day. 22:00 UTC, 63.6K BTC, 3.1% of the day. 23:00 UTC, 59.3K BTC, 2.9% of the day.
Inspect hours of the UTC day
Arrow keys move one displayed hour. Home and End jump to the first and last.
23:00 UTC
- Traded in that hour: 59.3K BTC
- Share of the day: 2.9%
- This is not the busiest hour
Which hours are busiest?
14:00 UTCThe exchanges are busiest at 14:00 UTC, which carries about 1.9 times the trading of an average hour. The quietest is 04:00 UTC, at roughly 0.6 times an average hour.
If trading were spread evenly, every hour would carry one twenty-fourth of the day. Measured over the last 90 days across the exchanges this page records.
The shape is old. Switching the chart to every hour on record puts the peak at 14:00 UTC, the same hour the last 90 days give. That long view reaches back to 17 August 2017 and is built from 4 exchanges rather than 5: Kraken keeps only a short history and cannot be in it.
Which half of the day carries the trading?
54%of Binance's trading is in the west half68%of Coinbase's is15 pointsbetween the two, trading the same coinEast is 00:00 to 12:00 UTC and west is 12:00 to 24:00 UTC. We name the hours rather than the places, because an exchange’s computers tell you nothing about where its customers sit and working hours in different parts of the world overlap.
The moves are a different kind of fact. Which half an exchange is busiest in belongs to that exchange, and the answers differ by 15 points. Which half moves more belongs to Bitcoin: the typical hourly move is 0.219% in the east half and 0.252% in the west, and every exchange we record reported that same pair to three decimal places, because they are all watching one price.
Do weekends look different?
$1.91Bon an average weekday$1.12Bon an average weekend day41% quieteron a weekend day than a weekdayAcross 5,464 days from 18 August 2011. Bitcoin itself never closes, so this is not a market shutting: it is people, and the banks that move their money, keeping office hours.
Do the exchanges agree on the price?
0.001%Among the exchanges that price Bitcoin in dollars, the widest gap is 0.001% of the price. They agree to about a thousandth of a percent.
Bitstamp, Coinbase, Kraken price in dollars. Binance and OKX price in a dollar-linked token.
The bigger gap is not between exchanges. Compare the dollar exchanges against the token-priced ones and the gap is 0.069%, about 52 times the gap inside either group. That is the token drifting from a dollar rather than any exchange being out of line, which is exactly the mistake behind most published Coinbase premium figures. There is a page on that, one click away.
Usually dailyHow far apart the exchanges’ closing prices sit, each month. About 19 times tighter than in 2017. Monthly rather than daily, because a single day’s gap flickers with one exchange’s maintenance window. Drawn only for days with at least three exchanges reporting, and the count travels with each month: a month made of three and a month made of five are not the same measurement.
Latest displayed reading: 0.036 on Sep 1, 2026. This view shows 110 dated readings from Aug 1, 2017 to Sep 1, 2026. The latest displayed reading is lower than the first. The displayed low is 0.027 on Jul 1, 2023. The displayed high is 2.935 on Dec 1, 2017. 3,209 days in this range have no reading.
Pick two to four dates and read this chart's values side by side.
What does this mean for you?
If you are placing an order of ordinary size, none of this needs to change what you do. The exchanges agree on the price to within a thousandth of a percent, and they agree at four in the morning as well as at two in the afternoon.
It matters more for a large order. The quietest hours carry roughly a third of the trading the busiest one does, so the same order asks more of the market at 04:00 UTC than at 14:00 UTC, and moves the price further while it fills. The other place it matters is expectations: a quiet weekend is normal, not a warning, and reading a calm Sunday as the market losing interest is reading the calendar.
Understanding Bitcoin Exchange Trading Hours
Where it stands today
Bitcoin Exchange Trading Hours is busiest at 14:00 UTC across the exchanges as of .
Bitcoin never closes, but it is not equally busy. Sort every hour of trading by the clock and a clear shape appears: one stretch of the day carries roughly twice the trading of an average hour, another carries barely half. This page draws that shape from the exchanges we record, hour by hour, and it draws a second one going back to 2011 from the exchanges that keep a long enough record.
Everything here is in UTC, and the day is split into two halves named east and west with their hour ranges printed beside them. That is deliberate. An exchange's computers tell you nothing about where its customers are sitting, working hours in different places overlap, and a chart that put continents on it would be inventing something the numbers do not contain. What the numbers do contain is the hour.
Two of the readings on this page are different kinds of fact and the page keeps them apart. Which half of the day an exchange is busiest in belongs to that exchange: over the last three months the busier half carried 68% of one exchange's trading and 53% of another's, a gap of fifteen points between two places trading the same coin. Which half moves more belongs to Bitcoin: every exchange we record reported the same figure to three decimal places, because there is only one price and they are all watching it.
The last question here is whether the exchanges agree on that price at all. Among the ones that price Bitcoin in dollars, they agree to within about a thousandth of a percent. The bigger gap on the page is between those and the ones that price it in a dollar-linked token, and that gap is mostly the token drifting from a dollar rather than any exchange being out of line. There is a page on that, one click away.