Current Time in Cancun, Mexico

How Cancun Keeps Time

Cancun keeps EST, UTC-5. The live clock normally synchronizes to the site time source and then applies the IANA rules for Cancun; until synchronization succeeds, it uses the device clock as a fallback. Daylight-saving changes are applied only where that zone actually observes them.

Cancun runs on the America/Cancun zone in the IANA time zone database, which is UTC-5 right now. There is no daylight saving here, so that offset holds all year and the difference to other places only changes when they move their own clocks.

The sun rises in Cancun at 6:46 am today and sets at 6:16 pm — 11 hours 30 minutes of daylight, with solar noon at 12:31 pm. Those times come from the city’s coordinates (21.16, -86.85), so they shift a little every day of the year.

On the two solstices, Cancun has about 13 hours 25 minutes of daylight in June and 10 hours 51 minutes in December. The difference is about 2 hours 35 minutes, which shows how strongly the local daylight cycle changes through the year.

At the current civil offset, Cancun’s longitude corresponds to a difference of about 47 minutes between zone time and longitude-based mean solar time. Today’s calculated solar noon is 12:31 pm rather than 12:00 on the clock.

EST is one of several zones in Mexico, so a time quoted for the country as a whole is not necessarily the time here. Check the city rather than the country when it matters.

Cancun at a Glance

How Cancun Compares with Other Cities

Read the last column as the other city relative to Cancun. Where either place uses daylight saving, the gap changes for part of the year — the time difference calculator always shows today’s figure.

Nearby Listed Cities to Cancun

Distances are straight-line geographic distances between the coordinates used by the directory; road or rail distances will be longer.

Other Cities in Mexico

Mexico keeps more than one zone, so these do not all read the same.