When Does NG (Natural Gas Futures) Actually Move? Hourly Ranges on 5 minute Charts

Educational reference. Measured from 16,605 recorded 5 minute bars of Natural Gas through October 14, 2026.

08:00 is the busiest hour, averaging 0.0110 per bar — 11.0× 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 Natural Gas, hour by hour, measured from 16,605 recorded bars over the last 90 days.

Hour (ET)	Median range	Bars
00:00	0.0020	720
01:00	0.0020	718
02:00	0.0040	726
03:00	0.0040	725
04:00	0.0040	725
05:00	0.0040	734
06:00	0.0040	732
07:00	0.0070	738
08:00	0.0110	740
09:00	0.0100	745
10:00	0.0080	738
11:00	0.0070	730
12:00	0.0060	732
13:00	0.0060	743
14:00	0.0070	734
15:00	0.0040	712
16:00	0.0030	706
17:00	0.0050	65
18:00	0.0020	642
19:00	0.0010	667
20:00	0.0020	716
21:00	0.0020	716
22:00	0.0020	704
23:00	0.0020	697

The spread across the day

The busiest hour is 08:00, averaging 0.0110 per bar. The quietest is 19:00 at 0.0010. That is a 11.0× difference across the same instrument, the same timeframe, the same trading day.

A stop sized for 19:00 conditions will be caught routinely at 08:00, and a stop sized for 08:00 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 Natural Gas 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.