When Does GBPUSD (British Pound / US Dollar) Actually Move? Hourly Ranges on 1 minute Charts

Educational reference. Measured from 30,657 recorded 1 minute bars of British Pound / U.S. Dollar through October 19, 2026.

10:00 is the busiest hour, averaging 0.0002 per bar — 4.4× the quietest hour at 18:00.

The same stop is a different stop at different times of day. This is the median high to low range of a single 1 minute bar of British Pound / U.S. Dollar, hour by hour, measured from 30,657 recorded bars over the last 90 days.

Hour (ET)	Median range	Bars
00:00	0.0001	1,318
01:00	0.0001	1,320
02:00	0.0001	1,320
03:00	0.0002	1,320
04:00	0.0001	1,320
05:00	0.0001	1,320
06:00	0.0001	1,320
07:00	0.0001	1,320
08:00	0.0002	1,320
09:00	0.0002	1,320
10:00	0.0002	1,307
11:00	0.0002	1,260
12:00	0.0001	1,260
13:00	0.0001	1,260
14:00	0.0001	1,260
15:00	0.0001	1,260
16:00	0.0001	1,207
17:00	0.0002	1,111
18:00	0.0001	1,260
19:00	0.0001	1,257
20:00	0.0001	1,260
21:00	0.0001	1,260
22:00	0.0001	1,260
23:00	0.0001	1,237

The spread across the day

The busiest hour is 10:00, averaging 0.0002 per bar. The quietest is 18:00 at 0.0001. That is a 4.4× difference across the same instrument, the same timeframe, the same trading day.

A stop sized for 18:00 conditions will be caught routinely at 10:00, and a stop sized for 10:00 gives away far more than it needs to overnight. The same number of points does not mean the same thing at every hour.

How this was measured

Every 1 minute bar of British Pound / U.S. Dollar recorded in the last 90 days was grouped by the hour it opened, in Eastern time. The figure shown is the median of high minus low within each group — the middle bar of that hour, not the average, so a single outlier session cannot distort it. Hours with fewer than 60 recorded bars are omitted rather than shown on thin evidence.

These are recorded market ranges, not predictions. Nothing on this page is a projection.