Will the clocks stop changing?

Twice a year, across most of Europe and North America, hundreds of millions of people move their clocks by an hour, forward in spring, back in autumn, and twice a year a familiar question resurfaces: why do we still do this, and could we simply stop? The idea of abolishing the twice-yearly change is one of the rare pieces of policy that seems to command broad, cross-party enthusiasm. And yet, on both sides of the Atlantic, serious attempts to end it have run aground on the same rock. Stopping the clock change turns out to be the easy part. Deciding which time to keep is the hard part, and it is where the whole project keeps stalling.

Why people want it to stop

The appetite for change is not hard to explain. The spring shift, when an hour of sleep vanishes overnight, is associated with a measurable run of disruption; the evidence on how the change affects sleep and the body is covered in its own guide on daylight saving and your health, so it is enough to say here that the losing-an-hour weekend is more than a minor inconvenience. Beyond health there is the sheer friction: recurring meetings drift, software has to be patched, and anyone coordinating across borders has to remember that daylight saving begins and ends on different dates in different places. Surveys in both the EU and the US have repeatedly found large majorities who would rather the ritual ended. The consensus that something should change is, unusually, real.

The US: the Sunshine Protection Act

In the United States, the vehicle for change has been the Sunshine Protection Act, a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent, locking the clocks onto summer time all year and abolishing the autumn fall-back. As of writing, its most striking moment came in March 2022, when the US Senate passed it unexpectedly, sending it to the House of Representatives. There it stalled. The House did not take it up, the bill did not become law, and versions of it have been reintroduced since without clearing the same hurdle. The Senate vote is often cited as proof that abolition is imminent; it is more accurately proof of how far short of the finish line even an approving chamber can stop. Notably, the bill chose permanent daylight saving specifically, lighter evenings, and that choice, as it turned out, is exactly the part reasonable people disagree about.

Europe: the 2019 vote that stalled

Europe got further on paper and no further in practice. In 2019 the European Parliament voted to end mandatory seasonal clock changes across the bloc, with an original target of 2021. Crucially, the European plan did not dictate which time to keep: each member state would choose its own permanent time, whether that meant staying on summer time or winter time. That flexibility was meant to respect national preference; instead it exposed a coordination problem. If neighbouring countries, closely integrated economies sharing borders and rail timetables, chose differently, Europe could end up with a messier patchwork of offsets than the one it started with. The plan needed agreement among member states to proceed, that agreement did not materialise, the pandemic pushed the question down the agenda, and as of writing the clocks across the EU still change twice a year. The wider politics of daylight saving, why different countries reached such different settlements in the first place , is a story in its own right.

The deadlock, which time do you keep?

Underneath both the American and European stalls sits the same genuinely hard choice, and it is worth stating plainly, because it is what turns an easy consensus into a stubborn deadlock. There are two ways to stop changing the clocks, and they are not equivalent.

Permanent daylight saving time keeps summer time all year. Its appeal is obvious, and it is exactly what makes the option politically attractive: lighter evenings, every month of the year. The cost is darker winter mornings. In northern latitudes that can mean the sun failing to rise until well past the start of the school run and the working day, for weeks at a stretch. Permanent standard time is the mirror image. It keeps winter time all year, so winter mornings stay comparatively bright, but the price is paid later in the day: the sun setting in the middle of the afternoon in December, earlier than many people would like.

The disagreement is not merely a matter of taste. Many sleep scientists and health bodies favour permanent standard time, on the grounds that morning light is what keeps the human body clock aligned, and that permanent summer time effectively holds everyone's schedule an hour out of step with the sun. A number of politicians and business voices favour permanent daylight saving instead, pointing to the value of lighter evenings for leisure, retail and outdoor life. Both cases are made in good faith; they simply weight the same trade-off differently. That is why a reform almost everyone claims to want has proved so difficult to actually pass.

Where it stands

As of writing, neither the United States nor the European Union has actually stopped changing its clocks. Both have come closer than at any point in decades, a Senate that passed a bill, a Parliament that voted for abolition, and both have discovered that the momentum to end the switch is not the same thing as agreement on what should replace it. The likeliest outcome for now is continued inertia: the twice-yearly change persists not because anyone is defending it, but because the alternatives each carry a cost that some constituency is unwilling to accept, and because on a shared continent no country wants to be the one that moves first and ends up an hour out of step with its neighbours. If the deadlock breaks, it will probably be because one side of the permanent-summer-versus- permanent-winter argument wins the public case decisively, not because the clock change finds any new defenders. Until then, you can check the current state of play, and exactly when the next change falls where you are, on the daylight saving pages.