CME Globex hours, trade dates and what a futures daily bar is

Regular Globex hours for four contracts

CME publishes hours in US Central Time (CT). Its contract specifications, read on 20 October 2026, give the same weekly frame for all four products below: open Sunday evening, close Friday afternoon, and a one-hour pause every weekday afternoon. That pause is the daily maintenance period, and it is where one trade date ends and the next begins.

The week is long but not continuous. From 5:00 p.m. CT Sunday to 4:00 p.m. CT Friday is 4 days and 23 hours, or 119 hours. Subtract four one-hour breaks, Monday to Thursday, and 115 hours of trading remain (our arithmetic). Each weekday session runs 23 hours, from 5:00 p.m. CT one day to 4:00 p.m. CT the next.

Bitcoin futures are the exception at CME and now trade through the weekend; we cover that in /articles/bitcoin-daily-weekly-close-utc-and-cme-weekend-trading.

Trade dates: the evening belongs to tomorrow

Each Globex session is booked to the trade date on which it ends. The session that opens at 5:00 p.m. CT on Sunday is Monday’s trade date; the one that opens at 5:00 p.m. CT on Monday is Tuesday’s. CME’s own holiday tables print this directly: next to the Wednesday 25 November 2026 reopening they show "trade date: Fri 27 Nov".

In practice that means the overnight Asia and Europe hours are the first part of the next day’s bar, not the last part of the previous one. Profit and loss, margin calls and the daily settlement cycle all run on trade dates, which is why the convention matters beyond charting. Our piece on margin and mark-to-market, /articles/futures-margin-initial-maintenance-mark-to-market, follows that cycle from one settlement to the next.

The conversion for trade date Monday 19 October 2026, while the US is on daylight time (CT is UTC−5, ET is UTC−4):

• Open: Sunday 18 October, 5:00 p.m. CT = 6:00 p.m. ET = 22:00 UTC.
• Settlement window: Monday 19 October, 2:59:30–3:00:00 p.m. CT = 3:59:30–4:00:00 p.m. ET = 19:59:30–20:00:00 UTC.
• Close: Monday 19 October, 4:00 p.m. CT = 5:00 p.m. ET = 21:00 UTC.

Settlement price versus the last trade

The settlement price is the official end-of-day price. It is what open positions are marked to and what CME reports as the change on the day. It is not the last trade of the session.

CME’s daily settlement procedure for E-mini S&P 500 futures sets a 30-second settlement period, 14:59:30 to 15:00:00 CT. The lead month settles to the volume-weighted average price of trades in that window, rounded to the nearest 0.25 index point. If there are no trades, the midpoint of the bid and ask in the window is used; failing that, a carry calculation from the cash index. Other months settle off spread trades against the lead month. The window ends at 4:00 p.m. ET, the same moment the New York cash session closes, but Globex keeps trading for another hour afterwards.

Other markets settle at other times. CME’s procedure for WTI crude oil (CL) uses a two-minute window, 14:28:00 to 14:30:00 ET, for the active month. So "the close" of crude oil for the day is set two and a half hours before Globex stops trading it.

A worked example: ESZ26 on 19 October 2026

CME’s settlements report for trade date 19 October 2026 lists the December 2026 contract with an open of 7,679.50, a high of 7,773.25, a low of 7,677.00, a last trade of 7,739.75 and a settlement of 7,734.50, up 30.25 on the day.

The last trade and the settlement differ by 7,739.75 − 7,734.50 = 5.25 index points. At $50 per point that is 5.25 × 50 = $262.50 per contract, all of it from trading in the hour after the settlement window (our arithmetic).

The change of +30.25 is measured from the previous settlement, not the previous last trade: 7,734.50 − 30.25 = 7,704.25, which is the 16 October 2026 settlement.

Yahoo Finance’s daily bar for ESZ26.CME dated 19 October 2026 shows open 7,679.50, high 7,773.25, low 7,677.00 and close 7,734.50. The open, high and low match CME’s report, and the close is the settlement, not the 7,739.75 last trade. Its 16 October close, 7,704.25, is again the settlement. Yahoo dates each futures bar by its CME trade date.

The S&P 500 cash index (^GSPC) closed at 7,690.73 on 19 October 2026 (Yahoo Finance daily close), at 4:00 p.m. ET. Because the E-mini settlement window ends at that same time, the two closes are close to simultaneous, and the gap, 7,734.50 − 7,690.73 = 43.77 points, is mostly the futures basis. We work through that gap for the S&P 500 in /articles/futures-contract-months-rolls-and-roll-dates. A vendor that used the 5:00 p.m. ET last trade as the futures close would show a larger gap that includes an hour of extra trading.

The 1 November 2026 clock change

CME’s hours stay fixed in Central Time, so their UTC equivalents move when the US changes its clocks. CME’s own trading-hours page dates US daylight time for 2026 as Sunday 8 March to Sunday 1 November.

Because Chicago and New York change on the same day, CT stays one hour behind ET all year. The change shows up for anyone working in UTC or in a country that changes on a different date. From the week starting Sunday 1 November 2026, CT is UTC−6:

• Sunday open: 5:00 p.m. CT = 23:00 UTC (22:00 UTC before the change).
• E-mini settlement window ends: 3:00 p.m. CT = 21:00 UTC (20:00 UTC before).
• Daily close: 4:00 p.m. CT = 22:00 UTC (21:00 UTC before).

Holidays: early halts, merged trade dates and normal days

CME’s 2026 Globex holiday list covers New Year, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Presidents Day, Good Friday, Memorial Day, Juneteenth, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas. The page notes that holiday hours are usually finalised about two weeks before each holiday.

Thanksgiving shows how a holiday changes the bars. For equity index futures, CME’s schedule closes the 25 November trade date at 16:00 CT on Wednesday and reopens at 17:00 CT for the 27 November trade date. On Thursday 26 November trading halts at 12:00 CT (1:00 p.m. ET), reopens at 17:00 CT, and closes early at 12:15 CT (1:15 p.m. ET) on Friday 27 November. There is no 26 November equity trade date at all, so a trade-date chart shows one long bar for 27 November that includes the Thursday morning. Energy and metals follow the same pattern with a 13:30 CT halt on Thursday and a 13:45 CT close on Friday.

Columbus Day (12 October 2026) and Veterans Day (11 November 2026) are not on the Globex holiday list. CME’s notices for both say all products settle at their normal times. The cash Treasury market is different: CME’s BrokerTec US repo calendar lists both days as closed. That is one reason a Treasury futures chart can show an ordinary bar on a day when the bond market it tracks was shut.

What PYE Markets shows, and how to check it

The "Today" strip at the top of our site includes a CME item built from the cmeSessionSchedule block in our data feed. It shows the next CME holiday or early close and links to CME’s holiday calendar. When we read the feed on 20 October 2026, it listed Thanksgiving, 26 November 2026, with a 1:00 p.m. ET equity halt, which matches the 12:00 CT halt on CME’s own schedule. Its Black Friday entry, a 1:15 p.m. ET close, matches CME’s 12:15 CT close.

Every time and price above can be checked on public pages:

• Regular hours: the Specs tab on each CME product page (E-mini S&P 500, Crude Oil, Gold, 10-Year T-Note).
• Holiday hours: CME’s Holiday and Trading Hours page; pick the date in the Globex holiday table for product-by-product times in CT.
• Settlement windows: the Settlement Procedures link on each Specs tab.
• Settlement prices: the Settlements tab on the E-mini S&P 500 page, which lets you pick a trade date and shows open, high, low, last and settle.
• Daily bars: Yahoo Finance history for ESZ26.CME and ^GSPC; compare the futures close with CME’s settle column.
• Our futures lesson is at /learn/futures, and contract months and rolls are covered in /articles/futures-contract-months-rolls-and-roll-dates.