From Mountain time to the Central clock
Central is one hour ahead of Mountain. When it is 10:00 AM in Denver it is 11:00 AM in Chicago, and a 4:00 PM Mountain deadline is 5:00 PM Central. Enter a time or press Use now and the Central time appears.
Arizona adds a wrinkle. Most of Arizona stays on MST year-round. For Phoenix, the gap to Chicago is one hour in January and two hours in July, because Chicago moves to daylight time and Phoenix does not. This page follows Mountain time as Denver keeps it, so it uses MDT in summer, and the gap stays at one hour all year.
This is a close pair, and the main scheduling issue is how the end of day arrives. A 9:00 to 17:00 Mountain day becomes 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM Central, so Central colleagues who leave at 5:00 PM have gone before the last Mountain hour. The hour-by-hour table shows this, hour by hour.
Close to midnight the date changes: 11:45 PM Mountain is 12:45 AM the next day in Central. The result marks it. The swap button reverses the direction when you need Central to Mountain.
Worked examples
Questions about this tool
Is it one hour or two hours between Mountain and Central?
One hour for Denver and the other Mountain places that change clocks. Phoenix is two hours behind Chicago in summer, one in winter.
Does Central time ever fall behind Mountain?
No. Central is always ahead of Mountain, so the result never goes backwards.
What shows if I choose a date in July?
The abbreviations switch to MDT and CDT, and the one hour gap stays the same.
Related tools
Where this comes from: IANA time zone database and the rules behind it ยท US Department of Transportation, uniform time and daylight saving time