Will daylight saving time end permanently in 2024? Here's what to know
Daylight saving time is going to begin Sunday the same way the twice-a-year time change has started for the last 17 years, only to end in November 2024 — but that end won't be permanent.
Time ran out for a proposal that cleared a major hurdle in Congress in 2022 to end the decades-old practice of making Americans change their clocks biannually, and a new version for the new Congress that took office the following January has been languishing in committees for a year.
Under the 2022 measure, daylight saving time would have been made permanent, and if the bill was signed into law, most Americans would have shifted their clocks one hour forward last March and left them that way. As it stands now, those clocks will need to be shifted forward an hour on Sunday, when standard time ends, and then we'll "fall back" again in November.
Does daylight saving time end in 2024?
Only until it starts again next March. House lawmakers couldn't decide in 2022 whether to keep daylight savings year-round or abandon it altogether and stick to standard time, according to a statement from Congressman Frank Pallone, the New Jersey Democrat who was then chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee.
"We don't want to make a hasty change and then have it reversed several years later after public opinion turns against it — which is exactly what happened in the early 1970s," Pallone said.
The last time daylight saving time was changed was in 2007, when new rules took effect to extend it by about a month in the hopes of reducing energy consumption, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology. For now, daylight saving time lasts 238 days a year.
What states don't have daylight saving time?
Daylight saving time isn't observed in Hawaii and most of Arizona. The territories of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands also don't observe daylight saving time, and the bill to make it permanent would allow them to remain exempt.
A CBS News/YouGov poll in 2022 found nearly 80% of Americans supported changing the current system. The idea of permanently shifting an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening appealed to 46% of Americans while 33% wanted the clock to run out on daylight saving time.
More daylight in the evening hours allows for people to be more active outside later in the day. However, "springing forward" can deprive people of an hour of sleep, and some parents want to let the sun set on daylight saving time, keeping the same number of daylight hours in the morning so children aren't heading to school in the dark.
One in five adults said the biannual ritual has affected their mental health in a negative way, according to a poll from the American Psychiatric Association that was conducted in September.
"This is a very, very high number of people who actually say that the change in time will give them some depression, some discomfort, some uneasiness," Dr. Petros Levounis with the group told CBS News.
In Europe, the countries that observe "summer time" change their clocks on the last Sunday of March. Most countries around the world don't participate in the twice-yearly time change, according to the Pew Research Center.
Why was daylight saving time started?
According to the Congressional Research Service, the U.S. started using daylight saving time in 1918 during World War I. Germany had started observing the practice in 1916 to try to conserve fuel with an extra hour of daylight in the evening, and other European nations followed suit as the war dragged on.
Last year, Congressman Vern Buchanan, a Republican from Florida who introduced the latest version of the so-called Sunshine Protection Act in the House to make daylight saving time year-round, called the biannual time change "inconvenient," "entirely unnecessary" and an "antiquated practice."
Sen. Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who sponsored the version of the bill that the Senate passed in 2022 by unanimous consent, has also introduced a new version for the chamber to consider. "This ritual of changing time twice a year is stupid," Rubio said in a statement.
Florida's other Republican senator, Rick Scott, and some of their colleagues in the GOP — Sens. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Katie Boyd Britt and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama — have backed the bill.
So have some Democrats, who hold a slim majority in the Senate. Sens. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Alex Padilla of California, Tina Smith of Minnesota, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Ron Wyden of Oregon support the bill, with Wyden calling for "a stop to the twice-a-year time-change madness."
When does daylight saving time end?
For 2024, daylight saving time ends on Sunday, Nov. 3, at 2 a.m. local time where observed.
This story has been updated to correct a reference to the month when daylight saving time ends.
