Daylight saving time ends in the United States on Sunday, November 1, 2026, at 2 a.m. local time. Clocks go back one hour to 1 a.m., so the change happens in the small hours of Sunday morning and you gain an hour. Phones and computers do it themselves.
The dates you actually need
| Event | When | Clocks |
|---|---|---|
| DST ends, 2026 | Sunday, November 1, 2026, 2 a.m. | Back one hour |
| DST begins, 2027 | Sunday, March 14, 2027, 2 a.m. | Forward one hour |
| DST ends, 2027 | Sunday, November 7, 2027, 2 a.m. | Back one hour |
The rule behind the dates
You do not have to look this up every year. Under current federal law, daylight saving time in the United States begins on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday in November. Those two rules generate every date, which is why the end date drifts between the first and the seventh of November depending on which day the month starts on. The change always takes effect at 2 a.m. local time, so it moves across the country time zone by time zone rather than all at once.
Places that ignore it entirely
- Hawaii stays on standard time all year.
- Most of Arizona does the same, with the Navajo Nation as the exception inside the state.
- Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands do not change either.
If you regularly call someone in one of those places, the gap between you shifts by an hour twice a year even though nothing changed on their end.
The international mismatch nobody expects
Other countries do not use the American dates. The European Union moves its clocks on the last Sunday in October, which is usually a week or more before the United States falls back, and countries across the southern hemisphere run the whole cycle in reverse because their seasons are reversed. For roughly a week or two each autumn and spring, the time difference between a US city and a European one is not the number you have memorized. If you run recurring international meetings, that overlap window is the one that quietly breaks them.
What to actually do on the night
- Leave your phone, computer and smart speakers alone. They update automatically from the network.
- Change the manual clocks before bed: oven, microwave, car, wall clocks and older watches.
- Check anything on a timer. Heating schedules, irrigation controllers, outdoor lights and older security systems often need doing by hand.
- Expect early darkness on Monday. Sunset lands an hour earlier on the clock, which is the part of the change people feel rather than the extra hour in bed.
If you want certainty for a specific place rather than a general rule, the official reference is the time service run by the US Naval Observatory and NIST, and any local time lookup will show the exact changeover for your city.
