Daylight Saving Time 2026: Key Dates and How It Shifts Meeting Times

If a recurring meeting with someone overseas suddenly lands an hour off in March or October, daylight saving time is almost always the reason. The tricky part isn’t that clocks change — it’s that different countries change them on different dates, so the time difference between two cities isn’t constant throughout the year.

2026 clock-change dates

United States & Canada: DST began Sunday, March 8, 2026, and ends Sunday, November 1, 2026. Clocks spring forward at 2:00 a.m. local time in March and fall back at 2:00 a.m. in November.
United Kingdom & European Union: Summer time began Sunday, March 29, 2026, and ends Sunday, October 25, 2026, at 1:00 a.m. UTC.
Australia: DST ended April 5, 2026, and resumes October 4, 2026 (New Zealand resumes September 27) — the Southern Hemisphere runs on the opposite seasonal schedule.

Why the US–Europe time difference isn’t fixed

The US and Canada switch on the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November. The UK and EU switch on the last Sunday in March and the last Sunday in October. Those dates rarely match. In 2026, the US moved to DST three weeks before Europe did, so for those three weeks the usual gap between, say, New York and London was four hours instead of the normal five. The same kind of gap opens up again in the autumn, in reverse, for about a week before Europe falls back.

If you run recurring meetings with participants across the Atlantic, this is the single most common cause of a meeting that suddenly shows up an hour wrong on someone’s calendar. Calendar tools that store the meeting in UTC and convert it per attendee handle this correctly on their own; tools that store a fixed local time do not.

Places that don’t observe DST at all

Not every region changes its clocks. Most of Asia, most of Africa, and most of South America stay on standard time year-round. Within North America, Arizona (outside the Navajo Nation) and Hawaii don’t observe DST either. If one side of a call is in a non-DST region, the time difference between the two locations will itself shift by an hour whenever the other side changes its clocks — even though neither city’s own local time “feels” different to the people there.

Practical takeaway

For any recurring meeting that crosses a DST boundary, check it again in the week following a clock-change date rather than assuming last month’s time still lines up. You can check the live difference for your specific pair of cities on the city comparison pages, which reflect the current offset automatically rather than a fixed number.