MetaTrader Server Time Explained

Open a chart, hover over a candle, or scroll the history tab in MT4 or MT5, and every timestamp you see comes from one place: the trade serveryour broker operates. The terminal does not translate those times into your local timezone, and there is no setting to make it do so — server time is a property of the broker, not of your computer.

That one fact explains a whole family of small confusions: why the “daily” candle does not open at your midnight, why a session indicator draws its box at odd hours, and why a trade you remember closing at 9:15 in the morning is stamped 16:15 in your account history.

A 24-hour market has no official close, so the industry borrowed one: 5pm in New York, the moment the institutional trading day rolls over and swap is applied. A broker that wants its daily candle to end exactly there needs midnight server time to coincide with 17:00 New York.

In winter, New York runs at UTC−5, so 5pm there is 22:00 UTC — which is midnight in a GMT+2 zone. In summer, New York moves to UTC−4 and the same close becomes 21:00 UTC — midnight in GMT+3. Hence the common convention: GMT+2 in winter, GMT+3 in summer, tracking the US clock change.

The payoff is a tidy chart: five daily candles per week, Monday to Friday, with no thin Sunday bar, because the Sunday-evening market open lands exactly on Monday 00:00 server time. Brokers on other zones — some run UTC, GMT+2 year-round, or something else entirely — print a Sunday stub candle and daily bars that cut through the New York close. Neither is wrong; they are just different conventions.

Because the convention follows New York, most such servers shift twice a year with US daylight saving— the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday of November. If your own country changes clocks on different dates (the EU switches in late March and late October), there are a few weeks each year when the mental offset you are used to is wrong by an hour. And some brokers skip the dance entirely and stay on one offset all year.

Server time is not cosmetic. It decides where each calendar day begins on your charts, and that boundary feeds through to anything built on daily data:

How the trading sessions map onto server hours is covered in the market sessions guide, and the rollover mechanics in the swap guide.

The quickest check needs no code. The Market Watch panel shows the current server time above the quotes. Compare it with a UTC clock while the market is open: if Market Watch reads 15:42 when UTC is 12:42, the server runs at UTC+3.

• Check during market hours — the server clock advances with incoming ticks, so over the weekend it rests at Friday’s last quote.
• Check twice a year, once in winter and once in summer, to learn whether the server follows US daylight saving or stays fixed.
• In MQL code, the difference between TimeCurrent() and TimeGMT() approximates the server offset programmatically.

Broker support pages usually state the server timezone too, but the live comparison is definitive — and immune to outdated documentation.

Conversion is two steps: strip the server’s offset to reach UTC, then apply your own. Both offsets can change with daylight saving, so use the values that were in force on the date of the timestamp, not today’s.

The free MetaTrader Server Time Converter runs this conversion in both directions for any server offset and local timezone.

Anything that groups trades by day — daily P/L, win rate by weekday, “best hour” statistics — implicitly picks a timezone for the day boundary. Group raw server times and a New York trader’s late-afternoon trades land on the next calendar day; group in local time and the figures match the days as you actually lived them.

So when reviewing your own MetaTrader history — in a spreadsheet or in an analytics tool that syncs your account — confirm which timezone the report uses before reading much into day-level patterns. A one-hour mislabel rarely matters; a whole trade shifted across the day boundary can change which session or weekday looks strongest.