Futures Trading Hours: Every CME Session Explained (2026)

Quick answer: the futures market is open almost 24 hours a day, five days a week. CME Globex opens Sunday at 6:00 PM ET and trades continuously until Friday at 5:00 PM ET, with a daily one-hour maintenance break from 5:00 to 6:00 PM ET Monday through Thursday. That’s it — that’s the schedule. Everything else on this page is the detail that actually matters when you’re trading it: the per-contract differences, the extra equity-index halt, holiday exceptions, and the session rules your prop firm layers on top.

What Time Do Futures Open on Sunday?

Futures open Sunday at 6:00 PM Eastern / 5:00 PM Central. That Sunday evening open is the start of Monday’s trade date — a detail that trips up funded traders constantly, because a trade you place Sunday night counts toward Monday for your evaluation’s trading-day math. If you’re on the West Coast, the week starts at 3:00 PM Sunday afternoon; in London it’s 11:00 PM; in Sydney it’s Monday morning at 9:00 AM (10:00 AM during US winter). The Sunday open is also one of the week’s most dangerous moments to hold an opinion: weekend news gaps price in immediately, spreads are wider, and liquidity takes an hour or two to build. Most prop firm rules don’t allow holding through the weekend anyway, so for funded traders the Sunday open is a fresh start, not a continuation.

What Time Does the Futures Market Close?

Two different answers, and both matter. The exchange closes daily at 5:00 PM ET for the maintenance break and finishes the week Friday at 5:00 PM ET. But if you trade a funded account, your effective close is earlier: most futures prop firms force all positions flat before the exchange close — 4:45 PM ET at Lucid Trading, 4:59 PM ET at Tradeify, and similar windows elsewhere. Miss the flatten window and the firm’s risk engine closes your position for you, and repeated violations can breach the account. We covered exactly how those two firms handle it in our Tradeify vs Lucid comparison. If you remember one thing from this page: the market closes at 5:00 PM ET, but your funded account closes earlier — know your firm’s number.

The Daily Maintenance Break (5:00–6:00 PM ET)

Every day from Monday to Thursday, Globex halts for one hour at 5:00 PM ET and reopens at 6:00 PM ET for the next trade date. This is the boundary line of the futures world: it’s when the trade date rolls over, when daily settlement is finalized, and when your prop firm’s end-of-day drawdown recalculates if you’re on an EOD account. Orders don’t execute during the break, and working day orders expire with the session. When traders ask “why did my trading day end at 5 PM when the market’s open at night?” — this break is the answer: in futures, a “day” runs from 6:00 PM ET to 5:00 PM ET, not midnight to midnight. That definition drives everything from how many trading days there are in a year to which sessions count toward your evaluation’s minimum-day requirement.

Futures Trading Hours by Contract

Most of the contracts funded traders care about — index, metals, energy — share the same clock. The big exception is grains, which still run a split session. All times Eastern:

Source: CME Group product specifications — always confirm a specific contract’s hours on cmegroup.com before trading it, especially around holidays.

ES & NQ Trading Hours: The Equity Index Quirk

Index futures like the E-mini S&P 500 (ES) and E-mini Nasdaq (NQ) carry one extra wrinkle: a 15-minute halt from 4:15 to 4:30 PM ET, right after the stock market’s cash close. The sequence every index trader should have memorized: cash equities close at 4:00 PM ET → futures keep trading to 4:15 → 15-minute halt → futures resume 4:30–5:00 PM → maintenance break. “Regular trading hours” (RTH) for index futures — the window most prop firm charts, volume profiles, and consistency discussions assume — is 9:30 AM to 4:15 PM ET, matching the cash session. Everything outside it is the overnight session: thinner, more headline-driven, and where a lot of funded traders quietly bleed out. Some firms restrict news-window trading; none we track prohibit overnight-session trading outright, but your fills will tell you why most size down after 4:15.

Gold & Crude Oil Trading Hours

Gold (GC and Micro Gold MGC) and crude oil (CL/MCL) trade the full Sunday-6-PM-to-Friday-5-PM week with only the standard maintenance break — no mid-afternoon halt like the index products. What actually matters for these contracts is when the liquidity shows up: gold moves with London and New York morning hours, and crude concentrates around the US pit hours (9:00 AM–2:30 PM ET) plus the Wednesday 10:30 AM ET EIA inventory report, which is one of the most violent scheduled moves in futures. If you’re trading energy on a funded account, put the EIA release on your calendar next to FOMC — a single 30-second spike through your stop is how a lot of trailing drawdowns die.

Can You Trade Futures on Weekends?

No — CME futures do not trade on Saturdays. The market is dark from Friday 5:00 PM ET until Sunday 6:00 PM ET. (CME’s crypto futures are the lone exception and run their own near-24/7 schedule, but no futures prop firm we track funds weekend crypto sessions.) For funded traders the weekend question usually isn’t “can I trade” but “can I hold” — and the answer at almost every firm is no: positions must be flat by Friday’s close, and firms’ risk engines enforce it. The weekend gap risk that rule protects against is real: Sunday opens routinely gap multiple points on ES and dozens on NQ when news breaks over a weekend.

Futures Hours in Your Time Zone

*Next calendar day in Australia. London/Sydney offsets shift by an hour for a few weeks each year when US and UK/AU daylight-saving changes don’t line up. A huge share of funded futures traders trade from outside the US — the near-24-hour session is exactly why the Australian and European prop scene took off — and every firm we track runs its rules on US Eastern or Central time, so anchor your trading day to ET, not local time.

Holiday Hours & Early Closes

Roughly ten US holidays a year modify the futures schedule — but here’s what most traders get wrong: most CME holidays are early closes, not full closures. Futures frequently trade Thanksgiving morning and Christmas Eve morning while the stock market is dark. We maintain the full calendar with exact halt and reopen times on our CME Holiday Schedule page, including what half-days mean for your evaluation’s trading-day count.

What Trading Hours Mean on a Funded Account

Everything above filters through your prop firm’s rulebook, and three intersections matter most. First, the flatten deadline: your firm’s forced-flat time (4:45–4:59 PM ET at most firms) is your real close — set an alarm 15 minutes before it. Second, the trading-day definition: a “day” is 6:00 PM ET to 5:00 PM ET, so a Sunday-evening trade is Monday’s trading day, and an early-close holiday still usually counts as a full trading day toward minimums — run your day-count math with our consistency calculator before requesting a payout. Third, EOD drawdown timing: if your account uses end-of-day drawdown, your floor recalculates at the 5:00 PM ET settlement — intraday swings don’t move it, the close does. Firms differ meaningfully on all three, which is exactly the kind of thing our futures prop firm rankings break down firm by firm.