Daylight Saving Time Around the World: Who Changes Clocks, and When

Time & dates · Updated October 2, 2026 · 4 min read

Daylight saving time (DST) moves clocks forward an hour in spring and back in autumn. It sounds simple, but countries change on different dates — and half the world’s summer is the other half’s winter — so the gap between two cities is not constant through the year. Most scheduling mistakes between continents happen in the few weeks when only one side has changed.

All dates below are computed from the IANA time-zone database for 2026, the same data browsers and phones use.

2026 changeover dates

Region                       Clocks forward      Clocks back
United States & Canada*      Sun 8 March         Sun 1 November
UK, EU and most of Europe    Sun 29 March        Sun 25 October
New Zealand                  Sun 27 September    Sun 5 April
SE Australia (Sydney, etc.)  Sun 4 October       Sun 5 April
Chile (most of the country)  Sun 6 September     Sun 5 April
Egypt                        Fri 24 April        Thu 29 October

* except places that stay on standard time all year

In the southern hemisphere the dates run the other way: New Zealand and south-eastern Australia set clocks back in April (their autumn) and forward in September or October (their spring).

The rules behind the dates

United States and most of Canada: second Sunday in March to first Sunday in November, at 2:00 local time.
European Union and the UK: last Sunday in March to last Sunday in October, at 01:00 UTC — so all of Europe changes at the same instant, whatever its time zone.
Australia (New South Wales, Victoria, the ACT, Tasmania and South Australia): first Sunday in October to first Sunday in April. Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia do not use DST.
New Zealand: last Sunday in September to first Sunday in April.

Places that never change

Most of Asia, including China, Japan, South Korea, India and Singapore.
Most of Africa and South America — Brazil stopped using DST in 2019.
Mexico ended DST nationwide in 2022, apart from some areas on the US border.
Within the US, Hawaii and most of Arizona stay on standard time all year (Arizona’s Navajo Nation does observe DST).
Iceland stays on UTC all year.

Rules do change: governments sometimes adopt, abolish or move DST with only months of notice, which is why devices receive time-zone data updates.

Why time differences shift

New York is normally 5 hours behind London. But the US moves its clocks three weeks before Europe in March and one week after it in autumn, so during those weeks the gap is only 4 hours: a 09:00 New York call on 20 March 2026 is at 13:00 in London, not 14:00.

Between hemispheres the effect is larger. London to Sydney is 11 hours in January (Sydney on summer time, London on winter time) but 9 hours in July. A meeting held at 08:00 in London is 19:00 in Sydney in January and 17:00 in July. Pairs where neither side uses DST — Tokyo and Singapore, for example — never shift.

The missing hour and the repeated hour

On the spring-forward night, clock times in the skipped hour do not exist: in New York, 02:00–02:59 on 8 March 2026 never happens. Software usually moves such times forward an hour.
On the fall-back night, an hour happens twice: 01:30 on 1 November 2026 occurs once in daylight time and again in standard time. Systems must decide which one is meant; timestamps stored in UTC avoid the ambiguity entirely.
Scheduled jobs and alarms at those times can be skipped or run twice. Schedule critical tasks in UTC, or outside 01:00–03:00 local time.

The timezone converter on this site applies the current rules automatically, and each city-pair page shows the year’s changeover dates for that pair.

Why we still change the clocks

Daylight saving time was adopted widely during the First World War — Germany introduced it in 1916 to save fuel — and returned in various forms afterwards. The modern case for it is longer summer evenings; the case against it includes disrupted sleep in the days after the spring change and the cost of coordinating schedules and software.

Proposals to stop changing clocks come up regularly. In 2019 the European Parliament voted to end seasonal changes, but member states never agreed on which time to keep, so nothing changed. In the US, the Senate passed a bill for permanent daylight time in 2022, but it did not become law. Until rules actually change, plan around the dates above.

A checklist for software

Store instants in UTC and keep the user’s IANA zone name (such as America/New_York) separately — never a fixed offset like −05:00, which is wrong for half the year.
Keep the time-zone database up to date in servers, containers and language runtimes; rule changes ship as tz data updates.
Test code paths for the skipped and repeated hours, and for zones with 30- or 45-minute offsets such as India (UTC+5:30) and Nepal (UTC+5:45).
Display times with the zone or city name so users can spot mistakes.

Unusual offsets and quirks

Not every zone is a whole hour from UTC: India is UTC+5:30, Nepal UTC+5:45, and New Zealand’s Chatham Islands UTC+12:45 (UTC+13:45 in summer).
Lord Howe Island in Australia moves its clocks by only 30 minutes for daylight saving.
China uses a single time zone, UTC+8, across a country that spans about five geographic time zones, so sunrise in the far west comes very late by the clock.
Some zones have changed their offset permanently in recent years, which is another reason software must use the IANA database rather than fixed offsets.

Checking a specific date

Because rules differ and occasionally change, the reliable way to know the offset for a future meeting is to convert that exact date and time rather than assuming today’s difference. The timezone converter accepts any date, and the city-pair pages list the current year’s changeover dates for both cities.