Which zone this page means. MST is standard time only; MDT (UTC-6) applies from March to November. Arizona stays on MST all year. AEST applies in winter; AEDT (UTC+11) applies from the first Sunday in October to the first Sunday in April. Australian seasons are reversed, so summer time runs over the southern summer. Queensland stays on AEST all year.
MST is behind AEST by 16 hours today
On 19 August 2026, Mountain Standard Time is on MDT at UTC-06:00 and Australian Eastern Standard Time is on AEST at UTC+10:00. The gap between them is 16 hours, with AEST ahead. So 9:00 am in MST is 1:00 am in AEST, and 5:00 pm in MST is 9:00 am in AEST. Going the other way, see AEST to MST.
The gap is not constant, and that is the part that catches people out
Mountain Standard Time is currently observing daylight saving and changes next on 1 November 2026, when clocks go back an hour. Australian Eastern Standard Time is currently on standard time and changes next on 4 October 2026. Because the two zones change on different dates — US rules for MST and AU rules for AEST — there are a few weeks each year when the usual gap between them is an hour out. That window is the single most common source of a missed call between these two zones, and it is why a page that quotes only the nominal offset is wrong for part of the year.
When you can actually both be at work
Taking a working day as 9:00 am to 5:00 pm local at each end, there are 0 overlapping hours in a normal day. There is none: the two working days do not touch at all, so any live meeting between Mountain Standard Time and Australian Eastern Standard Time has to sit outside somebody's normal hours. The table above shows which end has the shorter stretch to give up.
Zone rules are set by legislation and change, sometimes at short notice. This page is built against tzdata 2026a, last reviewed 2026-08-18. Quarterly. Zone rules change by legislation, sometimes at short notice. Version and review date are shown on every zone page. The converter above reads your browser's own copy of the zone database, so if a rule has changed since this page was built the live answer follows the new rule.
Every convention used above — whether the start date counts, how month ends are clamped, which holidays close an office — is written out on the methodology page, including the daylight-saving rules behind the 16-hour gap above.