What time do options expire?

Most US stock and ETF options stop trading at 4:00 p.m. ET on their expiration date, and a few ETF and index products trade until 4:15 p.m. The contract itself legally expires at 11:59 p.m. ET, but your practical deadline is your broker's exercise cutoff — the OCC's own deadline is 5:30 p.m. ET.

The expiration-day timeline

"Expiration" is not one moment — it is a sequence of deadlines, and the gaps between them are where traders get surprised. Here is how a standard expiration Friday unfolds for a US-listed option, all times Eastern:

Time (ET)	What happens
4:00 p.m.	Last trade for most stock and ETF options. After this, you generally can't close the position — only exercise decisions remain.
4:15 p.m.	Last trade for options on certain broad-based ETFs and indexes — SPY, QQQ, and SPX among them.
~4:30–5:30 p.m.	Broker exercise and do-not-exercise (DNE) cutoffs. Each broker sets its own deadline, often around 5:00–5:30 p.m.
5:30 p.m.	The OCC's exercise deadline — the final backstop behind every broker cutoff.
11:59 p.m.	The contract legally expires.
Next session	Assignments and share deliveries post to accounts.

Two takeaways: the market stops trading the option well before the contract dies, and there is a window after the close — roughly 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. — in which exercise decisions can still change while the stock keeps moving after hours.

Auto-exercise: the $0.01 rule

The OCC uses "exercise by exception": any long option that finishes in the money by $0.01 or more, measured against the underlying's official 4:00 p.m. closing price, is exercised automatically unless the holder files contrary instructions. In the money means positive intrinsic value:

Call: max(0, spot − strike)
Put: max(0, strike − spot)

So a $50 call with the stock closing at $50.01 gets exercised by default — even though $0.01 of intrinsic value is $1 per contract, and exercising means paying $5,000 (100 × $50) for shares worth $5,001 at that close. If you can't or don't want to take the shares, you must submit a do-not-exercise request before your broker's cutoff, or close the position before 4:00 p.m. Many brokers will also close at-risk expiring positions on your behalf during the final hour if your account can't support the resulting assignment, typically without asking first.

Worked example: after-hours pin risk

Pin risk is what happens when the stock moves after the 4:00 p.m. close but before exercise decisions are final. Walk through the numbers:

You hold 1 XYZ $50 call expiring today. At 4:00 p.m., XYZ closes at $50.60.
Intrinsic value = max(0, 50.60 − 50) = $0.60 per share, or $60 per contract. In the money by more than $0.01, so it is auto-exercised: you buy 100 shares at $50, paying $5,000.
At 5:15 p.m., the company issues weak guidance. The stock trades down to $48.90 after hours — but your broker's DNE cutoff has passed. The exercise stands.
Monday you own 100 shares worth 100 × $48.90 = $4,890 against the $5,000 you paid — an unrealized −$110, before counting the premium you originally paid for the call. The $60 of intrinsic value you "had" at the close became a $170 adverse swing ($1.70 × 100 shares).

The short side faces the mirror-image trap. Say you sold a $50 put and the stock closes at $50.20 — out of the money, so no auto-exercise. Then it drops to $49.40 after hours. The put holder can still file exercise instructions before the cutoff, and you can be assigned: forced to buy 100 shares at $50 ($5,000) while they trade at $49.40 ($4,940) — roughly a $60 hit you thought you had dodged at the bell. This is why many traders close short options before expiration rather than letting near-the-money strikes ride into the close.

AM vs PM settlement on index options

Index options like SPX are cash-settled — no shares change hands — and they come in two settlement styles that expire at different times:

PM-settled (SPX weeklies, most single-name and ETF options): the settlement reference is the 4:00 p.m. close on expiration day. This is the style behind 0DTE trading.
AM-settled (standard third-Friday SPX contracts): the last trade is Thursday afternoon, and the settlement value is calculated from Friday's opening prices of the index components. A gap between Thursday's close and Friday's open lands entirely on positions you can no longer trade out of.

Check the settlement style before trading any index product — two contracts on the same index can stop trading a day apart.

How traders handle expiration day

Know the product's last trading time: 4:00 p.m. ET for most, 4:15 for some ETF and index options, Thursday for AM-settled index contracts.
Know your broker's exercise/DNE cutoff — it is earlier than the OCC's 5:30 p.m. deadline and it is the one that binds you.
Decide before the bell. If you don't want shares, closing the position during market hours removes both exercise and pin-risk questions entirely.
Be careful with strikes near the money at the close — that is where after-hours moneyness flips do damage.

Options are high-risk instruments: a long option can lose 100% of the premium paid, and a large share of contracts finish worthless — see the exchange-sourced numbers in do options expire worthless?. This page is education and research, not financial advice, and ClaudeQuantAlgo is not a registered adviser. Our own published backtest — 161 simulated trades, 46.6% win rate, 0.82 profit factor — lost money (hypothetical results, posted in full at /record/).

Common questions

What time do options expire?

Most US stock and ETF options stop trading at 4:00 p.m. ET on their expiration date; some ETF and index options (SPY, QQQ, SPX among them) trade until 4:15 p.m. The contract legally expires at 11:59 p.m. ET, but exercise decisions are due by your broker's cutoff — the OCC's deadline is 5:30 p.m. ET.

What happens if my option is in the money at expiration?

The OCC automatically exercises any long option that is in the money by $0.01 or more against the 4:00 p.m. ET closing price, unless you file do-not-exercise instructions with your broker before its cutoff. For calls that means buying 100 shares at the strike; for puts, selling 100 shares at the strike — so you need the account capacity to handle the resulting position.

Can an option be exercised after the market closes?

Exercise decisions can generally be submitted or changed after the 4:00 p.m. close, up to the broker's cutoff (the OCC's deadline is 5:30 p.m. ET). If the stock moves sharply after hours, holders can exercise options that closed out of the money — which is how short options that looked safe at the bell can still be assigned. This is called pin risk.

Are index options AM or PM settled?

Both exist. Standard third-Friday SPX contracts are AM-settled: they stop trading Thursday and settle to a value computed from Friday's opening prices. SPX weeklies and most other listed options are PM-settled, referencing the 4:00 p.m. ET close on expiration day. Index options settle in cash rather than shares.

See the process with your own eyes. The desk posts trigger-based cards to a public, timestamped record — losses included — and published the backtest where its own raw scanner loses. The scoreboard is free to watch. Join the floor →

Free to join · paid floors optional · research and education only

Last updated 2026-07-15 · ClaudeQuantAlgo Research Desk · research and education only.

Disclosures. ClaudeQuantAlgo is a research and education community. Nothing on this page constitutes financial, investment, legal, or tax advice, or a recommendation to buy or sell any security or derivative. No profit promises are made, ever — trading stocks, options, and forex involves substantial risk of loss; options positions can lose 100% of their value. The public scoreboard reflects a model ("paper") desk — no real money. Past performance — real, paper, or simulated — never guarantees future results. Hypothetical and simulated results have inherent limitations and no representation is made that any account will or is likely to achieve similar profits or losses. ClaudeQuantAlgo is not a registered investment adviser or broker-dealer. You are solely responsible for your own trading decisions. Never risk money you cannot afford to lose.