S&P 500 Variance Futures (VA) trade on the Cboe Futures Exchange (CFE) Monday through Friday, 8:30 AM to 3:15 PM Chicago time (CT). These are cash-settled futures contracts based on the annualised realised variance of the S&P 500 Index. VA futures are NOT the same as CME index futures (ES, MES, NQ, MNQ) — they trade on a different exchange, with much shorter hours, and are used almost exclusively by institutional volatility traders. Futures day traders at prop firms like Topstep, Apex, MFFU, and Take Profit Trader almost never trade VA contracts. This guide covers the exact hours, contract specs, settlement formula, and what you should trade instead if you are a prop firm futures day trader who ended up here.
Cboe S&P 500 Variance Futures, ticker VA, trade on the Cboe Futures Exchange (CFE). The trading session is significantly shorter than CME futures:
| Day | Session start | Session end | Time zone |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | 8:30 AM | 3:15 PM | Chicago (CT) |
| Tuesday | 8:30 AM | 3:15 PM | Chicago (CT) |
| Wednesday | 8:30 AM | 3:15 PM | Chicago (CT) |
| Thursday | 8:30 AM | 3:15 PM | Chicago (CT) |
| Friday | 8:30 AM | 3:15 PM | Chicago (CT) |
| Weekends | Closed — no overnight electronic session | ||
That is a 6 hour 45 minute daily session. Compare that to CME equity index futures (ES, NQ, YM), which trade Sunday 5:00 PM CT through Friday 4:00 PM CT, with only a short daily maintenance window — effectively a 23-hour session. VA futures are a cash-market-style product: they open, they close, and they do not reopen until the next business day.
The 8:30 AM CT open lines up with the US equity market open (9:30 AM ET = 8:30 AM CT) because variance is measured against cash S&P 500 index moves, which only generate meaningful data during US equity hours. The 3:15 PM CT close is 15 minutes after the cash S&P close at 3:00 PM CT, giving the market a small window to absorb end-of-day S&P prints before settlement.
All Cboe Futures Exchange times are referenced in Chicago time. Cboe is headquartered in Chicago even though the name "Chicago Board Options Exchange" has been abbreviated to Cboe since 2017. If you are trading from another time zone, the easiest conversion is: 8:30 AM CT = 9:30 AM ET = 6:30 AM PT = 2:30 PM UTC (winter) or 1:30 PM UTC (summer DST). Verify against a reliable market hours source during DST transition weeks.
A Variance Future is a cash-settled futures contract on the realised variance of the S&P 500 Index over a defined time period. In plain language: you are betting on how much the S&P 500 actually moves, measured statistically, between the contract listing date and expiration.
"Variance" here is a specific statistical measure — the average of squared daily log returns, annualised over 252 trading days. Unlike the VIX (which measures implied volatility expected by the options market), variance measures realised volatility — the actual, after-the-fact volatility the index experienced. VIX futures (ticker VX) trade on anticipated future volatility. VA futures settle on what volatility did.
The contract multiplier is $1.00 per variance point. Prices are stated in variance points to two decimal places. A single VA contract has a notional exposure that scales with the variance level — if the market quotes VA at 200.00 variance points, the notional per contract is effectively $200 per variance point of movement.
This is the most important section for anyone who landed on this page by searching "variance futures trading hours" without fully knowing what VA contracts are. VA and CME equity index futures are completely different products.
| Contract | Exchange | Trading hours | Tracks | Settlement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VA (Variance Fut.) | Cboe (CFE) | Mon-Fri 8:30 AM - 3:15 PM CT | Realised variance of S&P 500 | Cash, 3rd Friday |
| ES (E-mini S&P) | CME | Sun 5 PM - Fri 4 PM CT (near-23h) | S&P 500 Index level | Cash, quarterly |
| MES (Micro S&P) | CME | Sun 5 PM - Fri 4 PM CT (near-23h) | S&P 500 Index level | Cash, quarterly |
| NQ (E-mini Nasdaq) | CME | Sun 5 PM - Fri 4 PM CT (near-23h) | Nasdaq 100 Index level | Cash, quarterly |
| VX (VIX Futures) | Cboe (CFE) | Sun 5 PM - Fri 4 PM CT (near-23h) | Implied volatility (VIX) | Cash, Wednesday |
If you are a futures day trader at a prop firm, you are almost certainly trading ES, NQ, or their micros (MES, MNQ) — or commodities like CL, GC, or agricultural contracts. You are not trading VA. The trading hours for the contracts you actually trade are near-24-hour CME sessions, not 6.75-hour Cboe sessions.
This is a common search confusion: traders searching for "variance futures trading hours" sometimes mean "volatility futures" (VX/VIX), "S&P 500 futures" (ES/MES), or just "daily variance in futures trading hours" (referring to different contract session lengths across products). If you are in one of the last two buckets, our best times to day trade futures guide is more useful.
For traders who actually want to understand VA futures, here are the current specs as published by Cboe:
| Specification | Value |
|---|---|
| Ticker | VA |
| Exchange | Cboe Futures Exchange (CFE) |
| Underlying | Realised annualised variance of the S&P 500 Index |
| Contract size | 1 variance unit per contract |
| Contract multiplier | $1.00 per variance point |
| Minimum tick | 0.01 variance point ($0.01) |
| Quote format | Variance points, 2 decimal places |
| Trading hours | Monday-Friday 8:30 AM - 3:15 PM Chicago time |
| Final settlement date | Third Friday of the contract month |
| Settlement type | Cash-settled to the Cboe S&P 500 Variance Indicator |
| Minimum order size | 1 contract (no fractional contracts) |
| Trade at Settlement (TAS) | Not permitted |
| ECRP / Block Trades | Permitted subject to CFE Rule 414 |
The final settlement formula is based on the annualised realised variance of the S&P 500 Index over the period from the contract's listing date to the settlement date. The index uses daily log returns with an assumed mean of zero, squared and annualised using 252 trading days per year. The final settlement value is rounded to the nearest 0.01.
Block trades and Exchange of Contract for Related Position (ECRP) transactions are permitted, which is how institutional users migrate existing OTC variance swap positions onto exchange-traded VA futures. That institutional use case explains the product's existence — VA was designed to replace uncleared OTC variance swaps after the Uncleared Margin Rules (UMR) made OTC variance increasingly expensive.
VA futures are institutional products. The typical VA trader is a volatility hedge fund, a pension fund tail-hedging an equity portfolio, a CTA running volatility strategies, or an asset manager wanting to hedge variance exposure without posting bilateral OTC margin.
Retail traders — the audience for most futures prop firms — are almost never VA traders. The reasons:
If you are reading this page and trying to decide whether to trade VA at a prop firm, the answer is almost certainly no — not because VA is a bad product, but because it does not match the profile of what any major futures prop firm allows or supports.
A lot of traders land on a "variance futures" page when they actually mean VIX futures (VX). VX and VA are related but structurally different.
| Feature | VX (VIX Futures) | VA (Variance Futures) |
|---|---|---|
| Measures | Implied volatility — expected | Realised variance — actual |
| Exchange | Cboe (CFE) | Cboe (CFE) |
| Hours | Sun 5 PM - Fri 4 PM CT (near-23h) | Mon-Fri 8:30 AM - 3:15 PM CT |
| Liquidity | High (front months) | Low |
| Retail accessible | Yes, widely traded | Rarely |
| Settlement | Cash, Wednesday morning | Cash, 3rd Friday |
VX (VIX futures) is a much more commonly traded volatility product. It trades near-24 hours, is liquid in the front months, and is sometimes permitted at prop firms — though many prop firms restrict VIX-related products due to the historical volatility of VIX futures around events. Check your firm's permitted product list before trading VX at a prop account.
If you are a futures day trader looking to express a view on market volatility without trading VX directly, the more common path is to trade the index itself (ES or NQ) and size aggressively during volatility regimes. Most prop firm traders do this intuitively without explicitly thinking of it as a volatility trade.
Cboe's holiday schedule for VA futures generally mirrors the US equity market holiday calendar because VA settles against the S&P 500 Index, which only trades during equity market hours. The full-holiday closures for 2026 include the major US market holidays: New Year's Day, MLK Day, Presidents' Day, Good Friday, Memorial Day, Juneteenth, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.
Early closes for VA typically occur on Christmas Eve and the day after Thanksgiving. The final settlement date for a given contract month is the third Friday — if that Friday is a CFE holiday, settlement moves to the first succeeding trading day where no market disruption event has occurred.
The holiday schedule is published on Cboe's website and should be verified there before planning around a specific date. Cboe holiday hours do not always mirror CME exactly, so a holiday schedule for the CME Group does not automatically apply to CFE-listed products like VA and VX.
If you arrived here as a prop firm trader, the contracts you are most likely trading (and the ones the prop firms explicitly support) are on CME, not Cboe. The permitted product lists at Topstep, Apex, MFFU, Take Profit Trader, Tradeify, and Bulenox are nearly identical — all CME Group futures, broadly divided into:
The trading hours for these CME products are near-24-hour sessions — Sunday 5:00 PM CT through Friday 4:00 PM CT with a small daily maintenance break. Equity indices close at 4:00 PM CT daily. Energy products close at 4:00 PM CT daily. Metals close at 4:00 PM CT daily. The specifics vary slightly by product but the session shape is consistent: long sessions, small breaks, six-day weeks (Sunday through Friday).
For a complete reference on CME futures contract hours and specs, our best times to day trade futures guide covers the high-volume windows across the major contracts, and the pass Topstep combine guide touches on how the Topstep 3:10 PM CT hard cutoff interacts with the actual product trading hours.
If you are running a trade copier at a prop firm, the contracts you are copying are almost always CME products. A NinjaTrader-native copier like Tradecovex, Replikanto, or ETP mirrors orders on ES, NQ, CL, GC, and their micros across multiple prop firm accounts. None of these copiers support VA futures — and realistically, nobody has asked them to, because nobody at a prop firm is trading variance futures.
If you are running a volatility strategy at a prop firm and wondering about copier coverage, the product you probably want is VX (VIX futures) or direct index futures. Both are covered by every major copier. Our NinjaTrader trade copier guide covers the practical setup for copying across multiple prop firm accounts on the contracts that prop firms actually permit.
If you are an institutional volatility trader looking at VA for hedging variance exposure or migrating from OTC variance swaps: session is 8:30 AM - 3:15 PM Chicago time, Monday through Friday, cash-settled on the third Friday of the contract month, $1 per variance point multiplier. Verify current specs against Cboe's published VA fact sheet before placing a trade, and confirm your broker's CFE data feed is active.
If you are a futures prop firm day trader who landed here: you almost certainly do not trade VA. The contracts you trade are CME products (ES, NQ, CL, GC, and their micros), and the session hours are near-24-hour from Sunday evening through Friday afternoon with a small daily break. Your prop firm's rules cutoff (Topstep at 3:10 PM CT, for example) is a firm-imposed daily flat requirement, not a CME session close — the exchange session runs until 4:00 PM CT on equity indices.
If you wanted VIX futures: that is VX, not VA. Near-24-hour Cboe session, much more liquid than VA, sometimes permitted at prop firms with restrictions. Always check your prop firm's permitted product list before trading any volatility product.