America/Toronto

TZ identifier and aliases

America/Toronto is the canonical identifier for Eastern Time in Canada, covering Ontario, Québec and Nunavut's Iqaluit. Canada/Eastern is an older name still pointing at the same rules but is a deprecated alias — use America/Toronto in new code. America/Montreal, America/Nipigon, America/Thunder_Bay, America/Iqaluit and America/Pangnirtung currently share identical rules and are folded into the same entry, along with America/Nassau in the Bahamas, whose DST schedule happens to match.

UTC offset and DST rule

Eastern Time in Canada is -05:00 (EST) on standard time and -04:00 (EDT) during daylight saving, following the same North American rule as America/New_York: the second Sunday in March through the first Sunday in November (March 8 to November 1 in 2026). Toronto and New York have kept synchronized DST schedules since Canada aligned its rule with the 2005 US Energy Policy Act change.

Using it in cron, CI and Postgres

Set TZ=America/Toronto for a process that should schedule by Eastern Canadian local time — using this identifier rather than America/New_York matters if Canada and the US ever diverge on DST rules again, which has happened historically at the provincial level even when federal policy was aligned. Postgres accepts it via SET TIME ZONE 'America/Toronto'; or the timezone setting, applying the DST rule correctly for any date. Where a scheduler supports a CRON_TZ=America/Toronto line, jobs run by local time directly; GitHub Actions' schedule: trigger always evaluates in UTC with no per-job timezone option, so a fixed-local-hour job needs its UTC equivalent updated by hand across each DST boundary. Avoid the 2:00–3:00am local window for anything that must run exactly once — it's skipped on the March transition and repeats on the November one.

History and quirks

Canada adopted standard time zones alongside the US in 1883, following the same railroad-driven system devised largely by Canadian engineer Sandford Fleming, who is widely credited as the intellectual father of worldwide standard time zones. Because Canada's provinces historically set their own daylight saving rules independently rather than through a single federal law, small pockets within Ontario and Québec have occasionally drifted out of sync with the rest of the Eastern zone during transition periods — a reminder that America/Toronto's uniform rule is a matter of provincial coordination, not federal mandate, unlike in the US. The city of Iqaluit, Nunavut, switched from Eastern to Central Time and back again within the 2000s before settling on Eastern permanently, which is why it's grouped under America/Toronto in the tz database today rather than its own separate northern zone.

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.