Every US State Split Between Two Time Zones

Time zone boundaries follow county and state lines rather than straight meridians, and those lines were often drawn based on which railroad or trading hub a community was tied to — not geography alone. That history left fourteen states straddling two zones today.

Florida (Eastern/Central, split at the Panhandle), Texas (Central/Mountain, split at El Paso and Hudspeth County), Indiana (Eastern/Central), Kentucky (Eastern/Central), Tennessee (Eastern/Central), Idaho (Mountain/Pacific), Oregon (Pacific/Mountain, Malheur County), Kansas (Central/Mountain, four western counties), Nebraska (Central/Mountain, the Panhandle), Nevada (Pacific/Mountain, West Wendover), North Dakota (Central/Mountain, a few southwestern counties), South Dakota (Central/Mountain, split roughly down the middle), Michigan (Eastern/Central, western Upper Peninsula), and Alaska (Alaska Time/Hawaii-Aleutian Time in the far-western Aleutians).

Arizona is sometimes mentioned alongside these states, but it isn't actually a zone split in the same sense — the entire state, including the Navajo Nation, sits in the Mountain zone. What makes Arizona unusual is that most of the state skips daylight saving while the Navajo Nation portion observes it, which changes their relative clock time seasonally without either region ever leaving the Mountain zone.

In most split states, the divide is barely noticeable locally, since it usually follows a rural county line far from the state's population center — Kansas's four Mountain-time counties and North Dakota's southwestern counties are both sparsely populated. The more populous exceptions, like Indiana's northwest corner near Chicago and Kentucky's Louisville-to-Paducah divide, are where the split actually affects large numbers of daily commuters and businesses.

For anyone scheduling calls or travel within a split state, the safest approach is to check the specific city or county rather than assume the whole state shares one zone — a mistake that's especially easy to make with large states like Texas, where only the extreme western tip differs from the rest.

Most of these splits have persisted for over a century, since changing a county's time zone requires a formal petition to the US Department of Transportation, and communities that have adapted their business hours around a particular zone rarely have strong incentive to request a change.