When Does GBPUSD (British Pound / US Dollar) Actually Move? Hourly Ranges on 5 minute Charts

Educational reference. Measured from 7,299 recorded 5 minute bars of British Pound / U.S. Dollar through October 13, 2026.

10:00 is the busiest hour, averaging 0.0005 per bar — 4.1× the quietest hour at 19:00.

The same stop is a different stop at different times of day. This is the median high to low range of a single 5 minute bar of British Pound / U.S. Dollar, hour by hour, measured from 7,299 recorded bars over the last 90 days.

Hour (ET)	Median range	Bars
00:00	0.0002	310
01:00	0.0002	312
02:00	0.0003	312
03:00	0.0004	312
04:00	0.0004	312
05:00	0.0003	312
06:00	0.0003	312
07:00	0.0003	312
08:00	0.0004	312
09:00	0.0005	312
10:00	0.0005	311
11:00	0.0005	300
12:00	0.0003	300
13:00	0.0003	300
14:00	0.0002	300
15:00	0.0002	300
16:00	0.0002	290
17:00	0.0004	283
18:00	0.0001	300
19:00	0.0001	300
20:00	0.0002	300
21:00	0.0003	300
22:00	0.0002	300
23:00	0.0002	297

The spread across the day

The busiest hour is 10:00, averaging 0.0005 per bar. The quietest is 19:00 at 0.0001. That is a 4.1× difference across the same instrument, the same timeframe, the same trading day.

A stop sized for 19:00 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 5 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.