Central Time and Houston
Houston sits in the Central Time Zone. That means standard time is UTC-6 and during daylight saving time it shifts to UTC-5. Most of the city runs on CDT from roughly the second Sunday in March through the first Sunday in November. Outside that window, it is CST. People often say Houston is the center of Central Time, and there is some geographic truth to that. The continent spans two hours between Mountain and Eastern, and Central lands right in the middle. Houston is not exactly on a prime meridian or anything, but it is large enough and central enough that when someone references Central Time for Texas, Houston is what most people picture first. Here is something most beginners miss. Daylight saving time does not start and end on the same calendar date across every region in the US. Arizona and most of Indiana stay on standard time year-round. If you are scheduling a call between Houston and Phoenix, for about six months of the year they are two hours apart, and for the other six months they are only one hour apart. I spent an entire quarter building scheduling logic into an internal tool that broke every year because I assumed Arizona always stayed one hour behind Houston. The fix was pulling the IANA database directly instead of relying on hardcoded offset tables. Not something you want to discover after the third quarter ends.
When I am working with timestamps in Houston, I convert everything to UTC at the point of storage. Local time zones cause problems, especially around the DST transition. On the spring forward Sunday in March, the clock jumps from 1:59 AM to 3:00 AM. Any scheduled event between those times simply does not exist. You can try to schedule a meeting at 2:30 AM Central and the system will reject it or flip it to an adjacent hour. In the fall, when clocks fall back, 1:00 AM occurs twice. I have had to handle duplicate event logs from that ambiguity in production systems. It is annoying but manageable if you store in UTC from the start and format for display only at the last possible moment. If you need to check current time in Houston right now, you can look it up without doing any math. Sites like timeanddate.com or even searching "Houston time" on Google will show you the current offset. I do not recommend calculating it yourself manually unless you are building something that needs to run without external dependencies. Even then, using a library like timezoneinfo or moment-timezone is better than hardcoding offsets. These libraries handle historical changes and future rule shifts automatically, which matters more than you might expect. The only real limitation here is that Houston follows US federal daylight saving rules, not Mexican rules, even though Texas borders Mexico. Different Mexican states make different choices about DST, and border cities sometimes operate differently depending on which side of the line you are on. This has caused actual confusion at airports and in logistics. Again, storing everything in UTC and converting only for display avoids this entirely.
