When do the clocks change in 2026?

Quick answer

In 2026, the United States and Canada spring forward on Sunday, March 8 and fall back on Sunday, November 1. The United Kingdom and the European Union spring forward on Sunday, March 29 and fall back on Sunday, October 25. Australia’s southeastern states fall back on Sunday, April 5 and spring forward on Sunday, October 4; New Zealand falls back on Sunday, April 5 and springs forward on Sunday, September 27. The full table is below.

2026 dates by country

Each transition happens in the early hours of a Sunday to minimise disruption. The “spring forward” column is the date the region moves to summer time (loses an hour, northern hemisphere) and the “fall back” column is the date it returns to standard time.

For a live view of every transition in every observing zone over the next twelve months, not just the regions above, use the DST tracker.

Which way the clocks move

The northern-hemisphere rule of thumb is “spring forward, fall back”: in spring you move clocks forward one hour and lose an hour of sleep; in autumn you move them back one hour and gain an hour. The forward move skips an hour of wall-clock time, so 02:00 jumps straight to 03:00 and that hour never exists locally. The backward move repeats an hour, so 02:00 returns to 01:00 and the hour between 01:00 and 02:00 happens twice. That repeated hour is why timestamps recorded in local time on a fall-back night are ambiguous — another reason to store events in UTC.

In the southern hemisphere the seasons are flipped, so the dates are flipped too. Australia and New Zealand move to summer time in September or October and back to standard time in April. The mnemonic still describes the mechanics — you do spring forward into summer and fall back into winter — but the calendar months are the opposite of the northern hemisphere, which is exactly the detail that trips up anyone scheduling a call between, say, London and Sydney across an April or October weekend.

Countries that do not change

The majority of the world’s population lives in places that keep a fixed offset all year. China, India, Japan, almost all of Africa, most of the Middle East, and most countries near the equator have never observed daylight saving or abandoned it long ago. Russia abolished it in 2011, Türkiye in 2016, and most of Mexico in 2022. For these places, the time difference to a DST-observing country still swings by an hour twice a year — not because their clock moves, but because the other country’s does.

There are holdouts inside DST countries too. In the United States, Arizona (outside the Navajo Nation) and Hawaii do not change. In Canada, most of Saskatchewan stays on standard time. In Australia, Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia do not observe summer time, which is why a single “Australian time” does not exist for half the year. If you schedule across these regions, do not assume a national rule applies to the whole country.

2027 dates

The rules are stable, so 2027 follows the same patterns — the second Sunday of March and first Sunday of November for North America, the last Sundays of March and October for the UK and EU. The dated version:

Why the dates differ between countries

There is no global daylight saving authority, so each country sets its own rule by law. The United States settled on the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday of November in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which took effect in 2007 and lengthened DST by about a month. The European Union harmonised its members on the last Sunday of March and the last Sunday of October, changing simultaneously at 01:00 UTC so the whole bloc shifts at the same instant rather than the same local time. Those two rules do not line up, which is the entire reason the transatlantic gap wobbles for a few weeks each spring and autumn.

That wobble is not a curiosity; it is a recurring source of missed meetings. For the three weeks between the US and UK spring changes, a recurring call that is normally “2pm London, 9am New York” becomes “2pm London, 10am New York” unless the invite was created against proper IANA time zones. The deeper mechanics of why that happens, and how to make calendar invites survive it, are covered in the DST 2026 survival guide and the broader time zones explained primer.

How to prepare

If you work across borders, the week before each transition is the time to audit recurring meetings. Three concrete steps cover most of the risk. First, check that every recurring cross-border invite was created against a real IANA zone (Europe/London, America/New_York) rather than a floating time or an abbreviation like EST — the former survives the change, the latter silently drifts. Second, for the weeks when the US and Europe are misaligned, warn the affected attendees explicitly that the local start time will move by an hour. Third, for any automated job whose timing matters, confirm whether it runs in UTC or local time, because a fixed local-time schedule will shift relative to UTC across the change.

To find a slot that works across the changeover, the meeting scheduler overlays each city’s working hours with the correct DST applied for the date you pick, and the time zone converter lets you set a future date and see the offset that will actually be in force then.

Related tools and guides

• The DST tracker — a live calendar of every transition in every observing zone for the next twelve months.
• The DST 2026 survival guide — the broken windows between US and EU clocks and the calendar-invite fixes that hold.
• The meeting scheduler and time zone converter — both DST-aware for any future date.

For the authoritative source data behind these dates, the IANA time zone database tracks every government’s rule and is what every operating system ultimately relies on.

FAQ