How to Mark Kill Zones in TradingView (Free Setup)

The fastest way to mark kill zones in TradingView is the built-in Trading Sessions indicator. It draws up to three timed boxes on an intraday chart, and you set each box to a kill zone: type the start and end time and use America/New_York as the time zone. That is one indicator, so it fits inside the two-indicator limit that TradingView's pricing page lists for the free Basic plan as of 18 Oct 2026. This guide shows the exact settings for TradingView kill zones, what the boxes do not tell you, and the one clock mistake that shifts them by an hour.

What TradingView gives you for kill zones

TradingView has no tool called "kill zone". It has a session indicator and drawing tools, and kill zones are just time windows, so both work. Per TradingView's help article, the Trading Sessions indicator:

• highlights up to three sessions, each as a coloured box around the bars that opened inside the window;
• works only on intraday timeframes;
• takes a start and end time per session, in 15-minute steps or as typed minutes, plus a time zone and a colour;
• can show the session name, dashed open and close lines, the high-to-low tick range and the average price.

Its defaults are Tokyo, London and New York hours. You overwrite them with kill zone times.

The kill zone times themselves are a convention, not a TradingView rule. We use the commonly cited ICT windows in New York time, the same list as in our kill zones vs sessions guide: Asian 20:00 to 00:00, London 02:00 to 05:00, New York 07:00 to 10:00 and London close 10:00 to 12:00. Sources differ by up to an hour, so pick one version and keep it fixed.

Step by step: set up the Trading Sessions indicator

1. Open a crypto chart and switch to an intraday timeframe such as 15m or 1h. On daily and higher the indicator draws nothing.
2. Open the Indicators menu, search for Trading Sessions and add it.
3. Open its settings. Turn on Show session names so each box carries a label.
4. For the first session, set Displayed name to Asian KZ and the session time to 20:00 to 00:00. TradingView treats an end time earlier than the start as an overnight session, so a window that crosses midnight works.
5. Set Session time zone to America/New_York. Do this for every session, because the field is per session.
6. Set the second session to London KZ, 02:00 to 05:00, and the third to NY KZ, 07:00 to 10:00. Give each its own colour.
7. Leave the open and close lines off at first. Turn them on later if you want to see where each window started and ended.

The fourth window, London close at 10:00 to 12:00, does not fit, because one indicator holds three sessions. A second copy of the indicator would take your second slot on the Basic plan. If you want all four, you can also draw the fourth box by hand, covered below.

Why the time zone field matters

TradingView's help article is explicit about this. A fixed offset such as GMT-4 does not follow daylight saving. It lines up with New York only while New York is on summer time, and it is an hour off the rest of the year. A named zone such as America/New_York adjusts by itself.

This matters now. The US moves its clocks back on 1 November 2026, so a kill zone fixed in New York time moves in UTC:

In Moscow time, which does not change, the New York kill zone is 14:00 to 17:00 until 1 November and 15:00 to 18:00 after. The London kill zone is 09:00 to 12:00 and then 10:00 to 13:00. With the named zone you enter the New York times once and the boxes follow the clock change. With a fixed offset you would have to edit them. Our trading sessions tool shows the session half of this live in your own time zone.

Do not confuse this field with the chart's own time zone. The clock at the bottom of the chart, or the Symbol tab in chart settings, changes only how times are displayed. Set the chart to UTC if you like; the indicator's boxes still use the zone you typed into the indicator.

Drawing a kill zone by hand

For the fourth window, or for a single day, use a drawing tool. TradingView's help pages list the Rectangle under geometric shapes and the Date range tool under measurement tools.

• Rectangle: draw it over the window. In its Style tab you can set the background colour and opacity and extend it left or right. The Coordinates tab sets the corners by price and by bar number, and the Visibility tab chooses the timeframes where it shows.
• Date range: it places two points on the time axis and shows the number of bars and the elapsed time between them, which is handy for checking that a box is exactly two hours wide.

A hand-drawn box is a fixed place on the chart. It does not repeat each day, and it does not know about clock changes. The help pages we read do not say whether drawing tools are limited on the free plan, so check your own account if you plan to draw many boxes.

Indicator vs structure on a real chart

The boxes mark time only. They say nothing about price. The part that decides whether a kill zone is useful is the structure you mark yourself inside it: where the resting liquidity sits, whether price takes it, and whether it closes back.

Here is Thursday 15 October 2026 on BTCUSDT, hourly, in UTC. In summer time the kill zones are Asia 00:00 to 04:00, London 06:00 to 09:00, New York 11:00 to 14:00 and London close 14:00 to 16:00.

What the chart shows:

• The 02:00 UTC candle set a low of 80,226.35. That low is the level the indicator knows nothing about. It is resting sell-side liquidity, the kind described in the liquidity sweep guide.
• The London kill zone, 06:00 to 09:00, did not touch it. The lows there were 80,500.01 and above.
• Step 1: inside the New York kill zone the 13:00 candle reached 79,800.00 and closed at 80,208.89, still under the line.
• Step 2: the next candle, the first hour of London close, dipped to 80,115.99 and closed at 81,871.95, back above the 02:00 low.

One day proves nothing, and range is not direction. It shows how to read the tool: the box tells you when to look, the level tells you what to look at, and the close back above tells you whether anything happened. Without the horizontal line, the New York box is just a coloured rectangle. For how to mark swings and shifts in structure, see market structure.

Mistakes to avoid

• Using a fixed GMT offset. It is right for part of the year and an hour wrong for the rest.
• Entering UTC times with the New York zone, or the reverse. Pick the NY times from the table and keep the zone on America/New_York.
• Looking at a daily chart. The indicator is intraday only.
• Trading the box. A kill zone is a window to watch, not a signal. See the kill zones vs sessions guide for what the hourly data does and does not show, and ICT macro times for the finer 20-minute layer.
• Filling the free indicator slots with copies. Basic lists two indicators per chart, so one Trading Sessions indicator leaves one slot for something else.

More walkthroughs are in the Handbook hub.

FAQ

How do I mark kill zones in TradingView?

Add the built-in Trading Sessions indicator on an intraday chart, set each of its three sessions to a kill zone window, and set the session time zone to America/New_York. For a window the indicator cannot hold, draw a Rectangle by hand.

Is there a free way to show kill zones on TradingView?

Yes. The Trading Sessions indicator is a single indicator, and TradingView's pricing page lists two indicators per chart on the free Basic plan as of 18 Oct 2026. Plan limits change, so check the pricing page before you rely on it.

Which time zone should I use for ICT kill zones?

Use America/New_York. ICT kill zones are defined in New York time, and TradingView's help article says a named zone follows daylight saving while a fixed offset such as GMT-4 does not.

Why do my kill zone boxes look an hour off?

Most often a fixed GMT offset, or a mismatch between New York time and UTC after a clock change. The US clocks go back on 1 November 2026, which moves the New York kill zone from 11:00 to 14:00 UTC to 12:00 to 15:00 UTC.