One important invariant of a closed Riemannian 3-manifold is the Chern–Simons invariant [1]. The concept was generalized to hyperbolic 3-manifolds with cusps in [11], and to geometric (spherical, euclidean or hyperbolic) 3-orbifolds, as particular cases of geometric cone-manifolds, in [7]. In this paper, we study the behaviour of this generalized invariant under change of orientation, and we give a method to compute it for hyperbolic 3-manifolds using virtually regular coverings [10]. We confine ourselves to virtually regular coverings because a covering of a geometric orbifold is a geometric manifold if and only if the covering is a virtually regular covering of the underlying space of the orbifold, branched over the singular locus. Therefore our work is the most general for the applications in mind; namely, computing volumes and Chern–Simons invariants of hyperbolic manifolds, using the computations for cone-manifolds for which a convenient Schläfli formula holds (see [7]). Among other results, we prove that every hyperbolic manifold obtained as a virtually regular covering of a figure-eight knot hyperbolic orbifold has rational Chern–Simons invariant. We give explicit examples with computations of volumes and Chern–Simons invariants for some hyperbolic 3-manifolds, to show the efficiency of our method. We also give examples of different hyperbolic manifolds with the same volume, whose Chern–Simons invariants (mod ½) differ by a rational number, as well as pairs of different hyperbolic manifolds with the same volume and the same Chern–Simons invariant (mod ½). (Examples of this type were also obtained in [12] and [9], but using mutation and surgery techniques, respectively, instead of coverings as we do here.)