What time is it in Costa Rica right now? 🇨🇷

It is 8:45 am in San Jose right now, Friday, September 25, 2026. Costa Rica runs on CST at UTC-6. Every reading on this page is computed from the IANA time zone database at the moment you loaded it, and the clocks above and below tick on from there.

Time in Costa Rica now

Costa Rica keeps a single time zone, America/Costa_Rica, so there is one answer to the question and it is the same in every town: 8:45 am. The offset is UTC-6, and it never moves.

The offset from UTC in San Jose is UTC-6, which is 6 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time. Nine in the morning in San Jose is 3:00 pm UTC.

Costa Rica time zone in full

Each row is a zone identifier from the IANA database, its reading at this instant, its offset from UTC and whether it is currently on standard or summer time. All of them agree today, which is the usual case for Costa Rica.

Does Costa Rica have daylight saving time?

No part of Costa Rica moves its clocks. The offset stays at UTC-6 through the whole year, which means a difference worked out today against Costa Rica is still right in six months. Most of the world now works this way; the daylight saving habit is concentrated in Europe, North America and a short list of others.

A fixed offset makes Costa Rica an easy place to schedule against, with one caveat: the country at the other end of the call may still be moving its clocks, so the gap can change even though nothing changed here. The windows further down this page are worked out at the current instant for exactly that reason.

Where Costa Rica is on the map

The marker is on San Jose, the point every sun reading and every call window on this page is worked out from.

Time difference between San Jose and major cities

Worked out at this instant rather than from a stored table, so daylight saving on either side is already in it.

Best time to call Costa Rica

A nine to five working day in San Jose against a nine to five day elsewhere. The overlap column is the stretch when both desks are open, given on each side's own clock.

Daylight hours in San Jose today

In San Jose the sun rose at 5:25 am today and sets at 5:30 pm, giving 12 hours 5 minutes of daylight. The capital is losing 33 seconds of daylight a day at the moment, and the sun stands highest at 11:28 am.

Solar noon in San Jose is 11:28 am, which is 32 minutes before clock noon. That gap is the capital sitting at 84.09 degrees west while its clock is set to America/Costa_Rica, plus the equation of time, which today runs 8.4 minutes ahead of mean time.

Moon phase over San Jose tonight

The moon is full moon tonight, 14.5 days into the current lunation, with roughly 100 percent of the disc lit. The next full moon falls on September 26, 2026 as Costa Rica reads the date, at 10:48 am local. The moon phase page has the full cycle.

Current time in Costa Rica cities

The 1 city this site covers inside Costa Rica, alphabetically, each with its own ticking clock and its own sunrise page.

Every IANA time zone in Costa Rica

These are the identifiers a computer uses. A program that stores America/Costa_Rica rather than UTC-6 keeps working through every future rule change, which is the whole reason the database is keyed this way.

Convert Costa Rica time to another zone

The converter pages below take CST against the zones people most often measure it from. Each one carries a full conversion table rather than a single answer.

Information about Costa Rica

Costa Rica sits in North America, carries the ISO country code CR and a population of about 5,210,000. Its capital San Jose is at 9.93 degrees north, 84.09 degrees west, which is the coordinate every sunrise and solar noon on this page is computed from.

Upcoming dates in Costa Rica

Read on Costa Rica's own clock, so the day counts below start from September 25 and not from a UTC date. The list is the internationally observed calendar plus the dates common across North America, along with this country's own clock changes and the next solstices and equinoxes. National days set by a country's own statute are not included, because this site carries no statute table and a guessed one would be worse than an honest gap.

Sun and moon in San Jose today

The sun is up in San Jose for 12 hours 5 minutes today, from 5:25 am to 5:30 pm. The moon sets in San Jose at 4:25 am and comes up again at 4:51 pm. The next phase is the full moon on September 26, 2026. The moon is full, or as near to it as makes no difference, and the whole of the face turned towards us is lit.

Twilight is graded by how far the sun has dropped below the horizon. Civil twilight ends six degrees down, which is roughly the point at which you need a light to read outside. Nautical twilight ends at twelve degrees, when the horizon at sea stops being usable for a sextant sight. Astronomical twilight ends at eighteen degrees, which is full darkness for an observer.

Golden hour is the stretch with the sun between six degrees above the horizon and four below it, and blue hour runs from there down to six degrees below. Neither is literally an hour: each is as long as the sun takes to cross those few degrees, which is minutes near the equator and can be most of the evening at high latitude.

Moonrise and moonset are computed to the moment the moon's upper edge touches a flat horizon, allowing for refraction, for the size of the disc and for the moon's parallax, which together put the centre of the moon at 0.125 degrees above the horizon at the instant it rises. That is a different horizon from the one sunrise uses, and it is why a moonrise time cannot be worked out with a sunrise formula.

Prayer times in San Jose

Seven days from September 25, 2026, computed for San Jose at 9.93 degrees north, 84.09 degrees west, on the clock of America/Costa_Rica. The method is Muslim World League (Muslim World League, Mecca), which puts Fajr at 18.0 degrees below the horizon and Isha at 17.0 degrees. Asr uses the Standard shadow ratio of 1, which is the Shafi'i, Maliki and Hanbali position.

Dhuhr is solar noon at San Jose, the instant the Sun crosses the local meridian, so it moves with longitude inside the time zone and with the equation of time through the year rather than sitting at a fixed clock reading. Sunrise and Maghrib are the standard refracted horizon, the same 0.833 degrees every almanac uses. Every figure above is computed from the Sun's position for this exact coordinate; none of it is copied from a table.

Different methods disagree, and that is expected rather than an error. Fajr under ISNA at 15 degrees comes later than Fajr under Egyptian General Authority of Survey at 19.5 degrees, by twenty minutes or more depending on latitude and season. Follow whichever your local mosque follows.

Qibla direction from San Jose

From San Jose the qibla is 59.8 degrees on a true compass, which is east-northeast, or 30.2 degrees north of due east. The Kaaba is 12,972 km away, 8,060 miles, measured over the surface of the Earth.

That figure is the initial bearing of the great circle from San Jose to 21.4225 degrees north, 39.8262 degrees east, which is the Kaaba inside Masjid al-Haram.

The bearing is measured from true north, not magnetic north. A magnetic compass points at the magnetic pole, and the difference between the two can be anything from nothing to more than twenty degrees depending where you are, so check your compass reading against magnetic declination for San Jose before you use it. A phone compass set to true north, or the shadow of a vertical stick at local solar noon, avoids the problem entirely.

Questions about the time in Costa Rica

What time is it in Costa Rica right now?

It is 8:45 am in San Jose as this page was served, Friday, September 25, 2026. The clock at the top of the page ticks on from there.

What time zone is Costa Rica in?

Costa Rica uses America/Costa_Rica, currently CST at UTC-6.

What is the UTC offset in Costa Rica?

UTC-6 in San Jose at this instant.

Does Costa Rica observe daylight saving time?

No. Costa Rica stays on UTC-6 all year and does not move its clocks.

What time does the sun set in San Jose today?

5:30 pm, after a sunrise at 5:25 am and 12 hours 5 minutes of daylight.

When is the best time to call Costa Rica from the United States?

Between 11:00 am and 5:00 pm New York time, which is 9:00 am to 3:00 pm in San Jose.

Where else to look

All countries · All cities · Timezone converter · Sunrise and sunset · Moon phases