America/Anchorage

TZ identifier and aliases

America/Anchorage is the canonical identifier for Alaska Time, covering the vast majority of Alaska. US/Alaska is an older name still pointing at the same rules but is deprecated in favor of America/Anchorage. Several other Alaskan city links — America/Juneau, America/Nome, America/Sitka, America/Yakutat, America/Metlakatla — currently share identical rules and are folded into the same entry, even though a few of them (Metlakatla in particular) have flip-flopped on observing DST at all within the past decade.

UTC offset and DST rule

Alaska Time is -09:00 (AKST) on standard time and -08:00 (AKDT) during daylight saving, following the standard US rule: the second Sunday in March through the first Sunday in November (March 8 to November 1 in 2026). That puts Anchorage on the same DST-adjusted offset as Pacific Standard Time for most of the year and one hour behind Pacific Time year-round otherwise.

Using it in cron, CI and Postgres

Set TZ=America/Anchorage for a process that should schedule against Alaska local time. Postgres accepts it directly via SET TIME ZONE 'America/Anchorage'; or the timezone parameter, applying the DST rule for any timestamp rather than a fixed offset that would drift wrong twice a year. Where a scheduler honors a CRON_TZ=America/Anchorage line (Vixie-cron and similar), jobs run by local time directly; GitHub Actions' schedule: trigger always evaluates in UTC with no per-job timezone, so a job meant to fire at a fixed Alaska hour needs its UTC equivalent updated across each DST boundary — an easy thing to forget for a zone far enough from UTC (nine hours) that the mental math is more error-prone than for Eastern or Central time. As with any DST-observing zone, avoid scheduling anything for the 2:00–3:00am local window: it's skipped on the March transition and repeats on the November one.

History and quirks

Alaska didn't join the modern US time zone system in its current form until 1983, when the territory's four separate historical time zones (Alaska, Yukon, Bering, and part of Pacific time near the panhandle) were merged into a single Alaska Time zone to simplify commerce and government operations, shifting some communities' clocks by as much as two hours in the process. The panhandle city of Metlakatla, part of the Annette Islands Reserve, opted out of Alaska Time's daylight saving for years — running on permanent standard time similar to Arizona — before eventually rejoining the DST-observing majority; because Alaska is so far west relative to its time zone (much of it is closer, longitude-wise, to Hawaii's zone than to Anchorage's), sunrise and sunset swing to unusually extreme hours across the seasons regardless of the DST rule in effect.

Offsets and DST transitions on this page are computed from the IANA time zone database bundled with your browser; the rules described above were verified against tzdata 2026b when this page was published.