When Does Daylight Saving Time Start in 2026?

Daylight saving time begins in the United States on Sunday, March 8, 2026, at 2:00 AM local time. At that moment, clocks in every zone that observes daylight saving jump forward to 3:00 AM, so the hour between 2:00 AM and 3:00 AM does not exist that day.

The rule is set by federal law: since 2007, daylight saving time has started on the second Sunday in March and ended on the first Sunday in November. That schedule applies uniformly across every US time zone that observes it, from Eastern to Pacific to Alaska.

Most of the country changes its clocks on March 8: the Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, and Alaska time zones all spring forward that morning.

Arizona (outside the Navajo Nation) and Hawaii are the two states that skip the change entirely. Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands — all on fixed, non-daylight-saving time year-round — don't change either.

Clocks don't count through 2:01, 2:02, and so on that night — at 1:59:59 AM, the next second becomes 3:00:00 AM. Most people notice this only the next morning, when it's suddenly an hour later than their body expects.

Because the change happens at 2:00 AM, almost nobody is awake to experience it directly; the practical effect is losing an hour of sleep and the sun rising and setting later for the following several months.

The 'second Sunday in March' rule was set by the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and has applied since 2007, replacing an earlier first-Sunday-in-April start used from 1987 through 2006. Choosing a Sunday minimizes disruption to work and school schedules, since the actual clock change lands in the middle of the night before a normal Monday.

Because the rule is tied to a weekday pattern rather than a fixed date, the start date can fall anywhere from March 8 to March 14 depending on the year — 2026's March 8 is the earliest possible date in that range, while 2027's March 14 is the latest.

Before this modern schedule, the US used a first-Sunday-in-April start from 1987 through 2006, and before that, individual states and cities set their own dates entirely — a patchwork the Uniform Time Act of 1966 first attempted to standardize, and the Energy Policy Act of 2005 later refined into the rule used today.