Futures Trading Hours: One Answer, and Why You Will Find Three Others

Scope: session times are quoted from the exchanges' own published schedules and linked at each claim. The intraday volume figures are measured on US-listed ETFs, not on futures contracts, and are labelled as such where they appear.

Stock index futures trade from Sunday 6:00 p.m. ET to Friday 5:00 p.m. ET, pausing every day from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. ET — 23 hours a day, five days a week. That is the outright contract. Search this question and you will also be told the day ends at 4:15, or 3:15, or 3:00, and those are Central Time figures: two belonged to this market at an earlier point in its history, and the third — 3:00 — is a settlement fixing, and has never been when the outright contract stops trading. Other closing times you will see are real and current — they belong to different ways of trading the very same contract. Here is the current schedule, why the others exist, and the one detail that matters most if you hold a position into expiry.

What are the futures trading hours?#

The exchange publishes these in both ET and Central Time; in CT the day runs 5:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. with maintenance 4:00–5:00 p.m. Because they are local times they hold year-round in ET and CT, and shift by an hour in UTC when US daylight saving begins and ends. Both columns were checked against the exchange's live contract pages on 14 August 2026 and cross-checked against the regulatory filing linked below. The live page is the authority on any given day.

The two are the same. That is worth stating because a fair amount of writing on this subject implies index and metals contracts run on different clocks — at the electronic-trading level they do not.

The same contract has more than one closing time#

This is the part almost nothing else says, and it is the real reason the question is confusing. "Trading hours" is not one schedule per contract; it is one schedule per way of trading that contract. On the S&P 500 contract, today:

Two of these close a full hour before the outright contract, one is split in half around the cash open, and the reporting window runs almost two hours past it. A page that answers "when do futures close?" with a single time has picked one row of that table.

For an individual investor the practical reading is simple: the outright contract is the row that applies to you, and it is the first one. BTIC, TMAC and TACO exist because they are priced against a reference the market has not produced yet. The ClearPort row is not a trading session at all — it is the window for reporting privately negotiated trades.

The detail that catches people at expiry#

Trading in a quarterly stock index contract terminates at 9:30 a.m. ET on the third Friday of the contract month — at the opening bell, not at the close.

If you are holding into expiry expecting a normal session on the last day, you have roughly seven and a half fewer hours than the schedule above suggests. This is a property of the contract, not of the venue's hours, and it is the single most expensive thing on this page to get wrong.

Why you will still find 4:15 and 3:15 quoted#

Both were correct once, which is why they survive in so many explanations.

A 2012 filing with the futures regulator extended the electronic close for the index contracts to 4:15 p.m. CT, and kept the 15-minute halt from 3:15 to 3:30 p.m. CT — a legacy of the open-outcry pits, which is the reason the exchange itself gave when it finally removed the halt in a 2021 filing. Today the close is 4:00 p.m. CT — earlier than the 2012 arrangement — and there is no mid-afternoon halt at all.

We are not going to guess at the date the close moved back: we have not yet located it in the regulator's record, and a forum post is not a source. It was most likely filed as a settlement-timing change rather than an hours change, which is why an hours-scoped search misses it. What can be said precisely is that both numbers describe arrangements that existed and no longer do. If a page quotes them without a date, it was written against an older schedule and never revisited.

There is a similar trap with 3:00 p.m. CT: a 30-second window, 2:59:30 to 3:00:00 p.m. CT, appears in the exchange's own filings as the volume-weighted average used to determine a daily reference. It is a fixing window, not a session boundary — but it is close enough to a round number that it circulates as a closing time.

Open is not the same as active#

Futures volume is not something we publish. Here is the same phenomenon on US-listed ETFs, which we do publish. These are ETF figures, not futures figures, included because the shape is what transfers, not the numbers.

An ETF can trade from 04:00 to 20:00 ET — sixteen hours. Its regular session is six and a half of them.

Share of each instrument's full-day volume across all bars, 04:00–20:00 ET. 2025-02-10 to 2026-08-07, 371–375 trading days per instrument, one-minute bars.

Between 87.6% and 97.7% of the day's activity lands in 41% of the available time, and the concentration continues inside the session — SPY's busiest hour carries 2.21× the volume of its quietest.

The consequence is the same one the 23-hour schedule implies. A price set when almost nobody is trading and a price set at the close look identical afterwards and rest on very different amounts of evidence. Treat a level that formed overnight as a hypothesis to re-test in the liquid session, not as a finding.

What this page does not say#

• It does not tell you when to trade. It says when the market is open and where participation concentrates. Those are facts about the venue.
• Holidays are a separate calendar, and futures holidays are not equity holidays. Early closes around Thanksgiving, Christmas and Independence Day differ between the two. Check the venue's holiday calendar for a specific date.
• Schedules change, and this one demonstrably has. Every time above was read off the exchange's live contract pages on the date this note was published, and cross-checked against the filings. If you are reading this much later, check the link — an earlier draft of this note quoted a close that had been superseded years earlier, which is exactly the failure this paragraph exists to warn you about.
• The ETF table is ETF data, offered as an analogy for the shape of the day, not as a measurement of futures activity.

Sources#

• E-mini S&P 500 contract specifications — the current Globex, BTIC, TMAC, TACO and ClearPort sessions, and the expiry termination time.
• COMEX Submission 23-471 (CFTC, 2023) — the gold and silver hours table, including the daily maintenance period.
• CME/CBOT Submission 12-356 (CFTC, 2012) — the 4:15 p.m. CT close and the 2:59:30–3:00:00 p.m. CT reference window.
• CME Submission 20-244 (CFTC, 2021) — removal of the 3:15–3:30 p.m. CT halt.
• NYSE hours and calendars — the US cash equity session and its early closes.
• Nasdaq system hours — the 04:00–20:00 ET window the ETF table is measured across.

One change worth watching: in April 2026 the SEC approved a Nasdaq proposal to extend stock trading to 23 hours a day. The overnight session is approved but not yet running. If it launches, the gap between "open" and "active" widens for stocks too.

Related reading#

• Best time of day to buy an ETF — the hour-by-hour version of the section above, on six US-listed ETFs.
• The overnight gap is mostly over before you see it — what happens during the hours this page calls quiet.
• The calendar effects are real and still useless — the same discipline applied to days instead of hours.