What time is it in Mexico?

Mexico City is in the Zona Centro, the Central Zone, at UTC−6 all year. The zone covers every part of the country not placed in one of the other three, Guadalajara and Monterrey included. Until 2022 the capital moved to UTC−5 each summer; the law passed that October ended the change, and its clocks have not moved since.

Most of it does not. The law Congress passed in October 2022 ended the seasonal change across the country, and clocks in Mexico City have stayed on UTC−6 since. The exceptions sit on the northern border. The whole of Baja California and a set of municipalities in Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas move forward an hour at 02:00 on the second Sunday in March and back at 02:00 on the first Sunday in November, the United States schedule, so that border cities keep the same time as their neighbours. Sonora and Quintana Roo had already dropped the practice, in 1999 and 2015.

Four. The Southeast Zone is Quintana Roo alone, at UTC−5. The Central Zone, at UTC−6, holds most of the population. The Pacific Zone, at UTC−7, takes in Baja California Sur, Sinaloa, Sonora, Nayarit apart from Bahía de Banderas, and five border municipalities of Chihuahua. The Northwest Zone, at UTC−8, is the state of Baja California. Remote islands keep the zone of their longitude, which puts Clarión in the Revillagigedo group an hour behind its neighbours San Benedicto, Socorro and Roca Partida.

The state changed in 2015 to a new Southeast Zone at UTC−5 and stopped changing its clocks, so it now sits an hour ahead of the capital all year. It had tried the same offset twice before, from December 1981 to January 1983 for commercial and tourism reasons, and again in 1997.

The October 2022 law first moved the whole state, border included, to the Central Zone at UTC−6 with no summer time. That broke the link between Juárez and El Paso, Texas, which had shared a clock since 1998. The same law let a state ask Congress for a different zone, and Chihuahua did. In November 2022 its northwestern border municipalities, Juárez among them, went back to UTC−7 with summer time, and those on the northeastern border, around Ojinaga, took UTC−6 with summer time to match Presidio, Texas. The published decree named the zones wrongly; the clocks followed its intent, and Congress planned to correct the text.

Since 1922, when a decree of President Álvaro Obregón set two zones: one on the 105th meridian west, seven hours behind Greenwich, from Baja California to Veracruz and Oaxaca, and one on the 90th meridian for the southeast. A third zone for northern Baja California followed in 1924, and the boundaries moved several times before 1942.