When Is Daylight Time? The DST Change Dates and Rules by Country

When is daylight time in each region?

Every country that still changes its clocks writes the rule as a weekday in a month, not as a calendar date. That is why the dates move a little each year while the rule itself stays the same for decades.

Turned into real dates, the next two years look like this.

When does DST start and end in the US?

Daylight time in the United States begins on the second Sunday in March, when clocks jump from 01:59:59 straight to 03:00:00 local time, and ends on the first Sunday in November, when 01:59:59 is followed by 01:00:00 a second time. Those dates have been in force since 2007, when the Energy Policy Act of 2005 stretched the season by three weeks in spring and one week in autumn.

Canada follows the same two Sundays, which is why the Toronto to New York or Vancouver to Seattle relationship never breaks. Mexico is the exception on the continent: it dropped nationwide daylight time in 2022, and only the municipalities along the northern border still switch, on the US dates, to stay aligned with the towns across the line.

When does daylight saving time dst start in Europe?

The European Union runs summer time from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October, and the rule is written in UTC rather than in local time. Every member state switches at exactly 01:00 UTC, so Lisbon, Paris and Helsinki all move at the same instant even though their wall clocks read 01:00, 02:00 and 03:00 respectively. The dates come from Directive 2000/84/EC, which made the schedule open ended.

The United Kingdom left the EU but kept the same two Sundays, so British Summer Time still starts and ends at the same moment as central European summer time. The government publishes the current dates on its clock change page. Iceland is the notable European holdout: it sits on UTC all year and never moves.

When do clocks change in Australia and New Zealand?

South of the equator the seasons are reversed, so daylight time covers the southern summer. New Zealand starts on the last Sunday in September and ends on the first Sunday in April. The Australian states that observe it, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT, start on the first Sunday in October and also end on the first Sunday in April.

Australia is the country where this gets genuinely confusing, because Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory do not observe daylight time at all. For roughly half the year Brisbane and Sydney share a clock, and for the other half Sydney is an hour ahead of its neighbour. South Australia makes it worse by sitting on a half hour offset, so Adelaide is 30 minutes behind Sydney year round and 90 minutes ahead of Perth in winter, two and a half hours in summer.

Chile is the other southern schedule worth knowing: mainland Chile runs daylight time from the first Saturday in September to the first Saturday in April, while the Magallanes region in the far south stays on one offset all year. Brazil, once a large user, abolished daylight time in 2019 and has not brought it back.

What time does the dst time change happen?

The dst time change is deliberately scheduled for the small hours of a Sunday. North America moves at 02:00 local time, Australia and New Zealand at 02:00 local standard time, and the European Union at 01:00 UTC. Nobody picked those moments for elegance: they are the hours with the fewest trains running, the fewest shifts changing and the fewest flights in the air.

Why DST dates are weekday rules, not fixed dates

If the law said "March 10", the change would land on a Tuesday in one year and a Saturday in the next, dragging a missing or repeated hour through the middle of a working week. Pinning the rule to a Sunday keeps the disruption in the same low traffic window every single year, at the cost of a date that wanders across a seven day span.

That is also why the two days are not 24 hours long. The spring Sunday has 23 hours and the autumn Sunday has 25, which is the main real world exception to the usual arithmetic covered in how many seconds in a day.

Rule  US  2007  max  -  Mar  Sun>=8    2:00   1:00  D
Rule  US  2007  max  -  Nov  Sun>=1    2:00   0     S
Rule  EU  1981  max  -  Mar  lastSun   1:00u  1:00  S
Rule  EU  1996  max  -  Oct  lastSun   1:00u  0     -

Why the New York to London gap shifts each spring

New York and London are normally five hours apart. Because the US springs forward on the second Sunday in March and the EU waits until the last Sunday, there is a stretch of two to three weeks every spring when New York has already moved and London has not, and the gap is four hours instead of five.

The same thing happens in reverse in autumn, but the window is shorter. Europe falls back on the last Sunday in October and the US waits until the first Sunday in November, so for about a week New York is again only four hours behind London. In 2026 that means four hours apart from March 8 to March 29, and again from October 25 to November 1.

Every north to south pair flips much further. Sydney is 16 hours ahead of New York from early November to mid March, 15 hours in the weeks when only one of them is on daylight time, and 14 hours from early April to early October. Nothing about these shifts is a bug: both cities are simply on the offset their own law says they should be on.

Which countries and states never change clocks?

Most of the world's countries do not observe daylight time, and the ones that do are concentrated in North America, Europe, and a handful of southern hemisphere states. Near the equator the argument for it disappears, because day length barely moves across the year.

• United States: Arizona, apart from the Navajo Nation, along with Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands stay on standard time all year.
• Canada: most of Saskatchewan, plus pockets of British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec, never switch.
• Asia: China, Japan, India, Indonesia, South Korea and Singapore have no daylight time. Russia moved to permanent standard time in 2014 and Turkey to a permanent offset in 2016.
• Africa: almost the whole continent keeps one offset year round. Morocco is the odd case, sitting permanently one hour ahead and stepping back for Ramadan, and Egypt reintroduced a seasonal change in 2023.
• South America: Brazil ended daylight time in 2019, and Argentina, Peru and Colombia do not use it.

None of this changes how timestamps themselves work. Unix time counts seconds from a fixed instant and has no concept of local clocks at all, which is exactly why it survives every clock change untouched. The details are in Unix timestamp UTC explained.

Will daylight saving time be abolished?

It keeps being proposed and it keeps not happening. In the European Union, a 2018 public consultation drew millions of responses that ran heavily in favour of ending the switch, and the European Parliament voted in 2019 to scrap it. The Council of the EU never agreed a common position on which offset each country would keep, so the existing directive still stands and the clocks still change.

In the United States, the Sunshine Protection Act passed the Senate by unanimous consent in 2022 but never got a vote in the House, and later versions have not become law. Under current federal law a state may opt out of daylight time and stay on standard time, which is what Arizona and Hawaii did, but it cannot adopt permanent daylight time without an act of Congress.

Individual countries do act on their own. Mexico dropped it in 2022, Brazil in 2019, Russia and Turkey earlier still. The practical consequence for anyone writing software is that these rules change with little notice, so the answer is never to hardcode an offset and always to keep the time zone database current.

How to check an exact DST moment in any timezone

For a specific instant, the timezone converter takes a date and a time, a source zone and a target zone from searchable lists of every IANA zone your browser knows, and prints the result five ways: the full date and time, the date on its own as YYYY-MM-DD, the time on its own as HH:MM:SS, the Unix timestamp in seconds and the ISO 8601 string. Each row has a copy button, a swap button flips the two zones, and a button fills the fields with the current time.

To watch a transition as it happens, the world clock shows 16 cities including New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Sydney and Dubai, each card ticking every second with the local time, the local date and the current UTC offset. During the shifted weeks you can read the offsets straight off the cards, UTC-4 next to UTC+0 in March instead of the usual UTC-5 and UTC+0. You can add any other zone from the dropdown, it is remembered in your browser, and clicking a card copies that city's time.

Timezone converterTurn one date and time into any IANA zone, with the timestamp World clockLive time and current UTC offset in 16 cities

Frequently asked questions