The forex market runs continuously from Sunday evening to Friday evening Eastern time. There is no daily open or close: trading passes from one region to the next as the working day moves around the world. Massive publishes quotes for the whole of that week, so a gap in forex data usually means the weekend rather than a missing session. The days and periods with no data in the seven US dollar majors, gold and silver are listed in How far back does Massive's forex and gold history go, and are there gaps?.
Applies to
- Plans: a Currencies subscription.
- Endpoints: the forex REST endpoints and the /forex WebSocket cluster.
- Asset classes: forex. Crypto does not stop at all, including weekends.
The four regional sessions
The four regional sessions follow the working hours of the major centers, and they overlap:
| Session | Local time | Eastern time, summer |
|---|---|---|
| Sydney | 08:00 to 17:00 AEST | 18:00 to 03:00 |
| Tokyo | 09:00 to 18:00 JST | 20:00 to 05:00 |
| London | 08:00 to 17:00 BST | 03:00 to 12:00 |
| New York | 08:00 to 17:00 EDT | 08:00 to 17:00 |
These are conventions describing where the activity is rather than opening hours anyone enforces, and the Eastern column shifts twice a year because the regions change their clocks on different dates. The busiest window is the London and New York overlap, roughly 08:00 to 12:00 Eastern, when the two largest centers are both working.
What that means for your data
What the sessions mean for your data is three things:
- Expect quotes at any hour on a weekday, including times a US equities developer would think of as overnight.
- Expect thinner data in the quiet hours, particularly between the New York close and the Sydney open, where spreads widen and updates slow.
- Expect nothing over the weekend. Forex data stops on Friday evening and resumes on Sunday evening Eastern. That is not an outage.
How to check whether forex is open right now
There is no calendar to consult, because the market status endpoint answers it directly and covers crypto in the same response:
curl -X GET "https://api.massive.com/v1/marketstatus/now?apiKey=YOUR_API_KEY"
Response
{
"market": "open",
"serverTime": "2026-09-14T13:07:11-04:00",
"currencies": { "fx": "open", "crypto": "open" }
}
Read currencies.fx rather than the top-level market, which is about US equities. Crypto sits beside it and is open every day, so the two disagree every weekend.
Why there is no closing bell
There is no closing bell because there is no exchange to close. Foreign exchange is traded bilaterally between institutions, so the market exists wherever two counterparties are both awake and willing. The weekend break is a practical consequence of the whole world's banks being shut at once, not a rule anyone set.
If you see an error
No forex data on a Saturday is correct. Compare against crypto, which does trade, if you want to check whether the problem is your pipeline.
A quote that has not moved for minutes in the quiet hours is usually genuine. Thin markets update less often.
An empty result for a whole weekday is worth reporting unless the day is one of the known gaps listed in How far back does Massive's forex and gold history go, and are there gaps?. A weekday outside those gaps is not a session effect.
Related
- What asset classes are available through Massive's Currencies Subscription?
- Where does Massive's currencies data come from?
- Does Massive have market data outside of normal trading hours?
- What timezone are Massive's timestamps in?
- How far back does Massive's forex and gold history go, and are there gaps?
