When does daylight saving time end this year and when will the clocks go back in 2024?

Although Labor Day is over and fall begins in less than three weeks, there are still more than eight weeks until Daylight Saving Time ends and our clocks go back an hour.

Daylight saving time ends at 2 a.m. on Sunday, November 3, 2024. The clocks will then go back an hour, theoretically giving us an extra hour of sleep.

Since summer began on June 20, the length of daylight has decreased slightly each day. The last sunset after 7 p.m. this year is September 17.

Daylight hours will continue to decrease day by day until December 21, when the winter solstice occurs at 4:19 a.m. After that, days will begin to increase again until the summer solstice on June 20, 2025.

The downside is that after we return to standard time in early November, the sun will rise about an hour earlier each morning. On November 2nd, in New Jersey, the sun will rise at about 7:29 a.m. and set at about 5:53 p.m. The next day, the sun will rise at 6:30 a.m. but not set until 4:52 p.m.

So while millions of people will spend most or all of their journey home from work in the dark in November, there will be more daylight on their morning commute.

On the first Sunday in November the clocks officially change from 2 a.m. to 1 a.m.

Daylight saving time began on Sunday, March 10, 2024, and ended on Sunday, November 3, 2024 – a period of 238 days. Since 2007, it lasted from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November.

The next time we will set the clocks forward is on March 9, 2025 – 126 days after the time change. Daylight saving time ends on November 2, 2025.

The concept is more than a century old, when the English architect William Willett proposed the idea of ​​changing the clocks in 1907 in “The Waste of Daylight”. The suggestion to use daylight more efficiently goes back to Benjamin Franklin.

During a visit to Paris in 1784, he wrote a letter to the editors of the Journal of Paris calling for a tax on every Parisian who kept their shutters closed after sunrise to “promote the economy of using sunlight instead of candles,” according to Michael Downing, author of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time.

Daylight saving time became widely adopted in the United States when the Uniform Time Act was passed in 1966. At that time, daylight saving time lasted from the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October, and states were allowed to opt out.

In 1986, daylight saving time was changed and now lasts from the first Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October. The most recent change came into effect in 2006, when the Energy Policy Act of 2005 moved daylight saving time from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November.

Hawaii and most parts of Arizona do not observe daylight saving time. The U.S. territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands also do not observe daylight saving time. Indiana did not adopt daylight saving time until 2006.

Eighteen states have passed laws to make daylight saving time permanent. Voters in California have approved year-round daylight saving time. However, these changes require approval from the federal government.

In March 2022, the U.S. Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act, which would end the twice-yearly time change. However, there was no vote on it in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Some provinces in Canada – most of Saskatchewan and Yukon – have permanently adopted daylight saving time, as have parts of British Columbia and two municipalities in northwestern Ontario.

About 70 countries observe daylight saving time. Most countries in North America, Europe, parts of South America and New Zealand observe it, but China, Japan, India and most other countries do not.

In other places it starts on different days. In Europe, for example, summer time starts on the last Sunday in March and ends on the last Sunday in October.