Daylight saving time: next clock change

How daylight saving time works

Daylight saving time (DST), called summer time in the UK and Europe, moves clocks one hour forward in spring and back again in autumn, so that more of the daylight falls in the evening when most people are awake. The rule is easy to remember: spring forward, fall back. In the Northern Hemisphere that means March and October or November; in the Southern Hemisphere it is the other way round, so Sydney and Auckland put their clocks forward just as London and New York put theirs back.

Each country sets its own dates. The European Union and the UK change at 01:00 UTC on the last Sunday of March and the last Sunday of October, so the whole continent switches at the same moment. The United States and most of Canada change at 2:00 local time on the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday of November, one time zone after another across the continent. Australia’s south-eastern states and New Zealand change in early April and late September or early October.

Why New York is 4 hours behind London for a week in 2026

Because the two sides of the Atlantic don’t change on the same day. In 2026, the UK and the EU turn their clocks back on Sunday 25 October (at 01:00 UTC, when 02:00 in London becomes 01:00), but most of the United States waits until Sunday 1 November. For those 7 days, New York is 4 hours behind London instead of the usual 5 hours. The same thing happens in spring, for 3 weeks, from 8 March to 29 March.

If you have a standing call between the US and Europe, these are the weeks it moves by an hour for one side. The meeting planner and the time difference calculator take the exact date into account.

Places that stopped changing their clocks

Daylight saving time has been dropped in many countries over the last fifteen years — usually by staying on one time all year rather than by changing the time zone itself. The world table above shows this directly from the time zone database: for each place with no change scheduled, it shows the date of the last recorded clock change. In the database this page was built with, that group includes Moscow (2014), São Paulo (2019), Tehran (2022), Mexico City (2022), Asunción (2024), Casablanca (2026) — the year in brackets is the last clock change. Tijuana and the rest of Baja California, along the US border, are listed separately from Mexico City because the database gives them a different rule.

There are proposals to stop changing the clocks in the European Union and the United States too, but the time zone database still has both changing twice a year — the table shows exactly what your browser knows. If a country changes its rules, the update reaches this page with your next browser update; we don’t keep our own copy of the rules.

How we find the next change

For the city you pick, your browser looks up the UTC offset one day at a time for the next 400 days. When the offset changes, it narrows the moment down to the exact minute, then reads the local time on either side — that’s how the page can say “at 02:00 the clocks go back to 01:00”. The previous change is found the same way, looking back. Nothing is sent to a server.