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Which U.S. states want to end daylight saving time changes

A guide to which U.S. states have already ditched daylight saving time and which ones want to make the switch permanent next

Arizona and Hawaii have not touched their clocks in more than half a century. Everywhere else in the U.S., the ritual repeats each March and each November — an hour forward, then an hour back. What follows is a week of complaints about lost sleep, dark mornings and sunsets that land before the workday ends.

The split traces back to the Uniform Time Act of 1966. The law set national start and end dates for daylight saving time, and it gave states a single escape hatch: decline to participate and stay on standard time all year. Arizona and Hawaii took it. No other state has.

The pressure now runs the other way. Legislatures in more than a dozen states have passed bills to lock their clocks on daylight saving time permanently. The trade is darker January mornings for an extra hour of evening light. Federal law blocks them. A state can drop out of daylight saving time on its own authority, but staying on it year-round requires Congress to amend the statute first. The Sunshine Protection Act has tried repeatedly to do that. The U.S. Senate passed it by unanimous consent in March 2022, and the House never took it up.

That gap between what statehouses want and what federal law permits is why the subject returns every spring and fall. Anyone searching for the states that want to stop changing the clocks is asking two questions at once: which states have already stopped, and which ones hold laws that cannot take effect yet.

This list runs state by state. It covers the two permanent standard time holdouts and the contingent laws that governors in Florida, South Carolina and Washington state have signed. It covers the California ballot measure that unlocked a legislative vote no one has managed to win. Several Western states wrote regional conditions into their bills so they would not switch ahead of their neighbors, and each gets its own entry. The final slide lays out the one step in Congress that would make any of it real.

Arizona already skips daylight saving time

Arizona has not observed daylight saving time since 1968, making it one of two states where the clocks stay put all year. The reasoning was climatic rather than political: an extra hour of sun in a Phoenix July means more heat and higher cooling costs, not a longer evening outdoors.

The state did try it once. Arizona observed daylight saving time in 1967, the first year the federal standard took effect, and the legislature voted to opt out the following year. Lawmakers cited summer heat and the expense of running air conditioning an hour later into the night.

The exemption covers most of the state but not every corner. The Navajo Nation, whose territory reaches into Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, does observe daylight saving time, keeping its clocks aligned across all three states for commerce and travel. The Hopi Reservation, surrounded entirely by Navajo land, does not. A driver crossing northeastern Arizona can pass through several time arrangements in a single afternoon without leaving the state.

Arizona's relationship to its neighbors flips twice a year. From November to March, its clocks match Denver and Albuquerque on Mountain Standard Time. From March to November, they match Los Angeles and Las Vegas, because the Pacific states move forward an hour and Arizona does not. Companies with offices in both zones have had more than 50 years to adapt, and scheduling software handles the shift automatically.

Lawmakers in other states point to Arizona as proof that a state can function without resetting every clock twice a year. The comparison has a limit. Arizona chose permanent standard time, an option federal law grants any state without congressional approval. The bills now pending from Florida to Washington state ask for the reverse arrangement, daylight saving time year-round, and no state can adopt that on its own. Arizona needed no permission; the others are still waiting for it.

Hawaii has skipped the clock change since 1967

Hawaii has not observed daylight saving time since 1967, when it declined to participate under the exemption written into the Uniform Time Act of 1966. The state runs on Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time all year, and its clocks have not moved in more than half a century.

Geography made the decision straightforward. Honolulu sits at roughly 21 degrees north latitude, close enough to the tropics that day length barely shifts across the calendar. The city gets about 11 hours of daylight around the winter solstice and a little over 13 hours in late June — a swing of roughly two and a half hours. Anchorage, by comparison, drops below six hours of daylight in December and climbs above 19 in June.

The case for daylight saving time rests on moving clocks to capture morning light that would otherwise go unused. That argument carries little weight in Honolulu. Sunrise there lands within about an hour of the same time all year.

Sunset follows the same narrow pattern, never falling much earlier than 5:45 p.m. in winter or much later than 7:15 p.m. in summer. Residents never face the early-darkness problem that drives legislative pushes in Minnesota, Montana and Washington state.

The practical consequence falls on anyone scheduling calls across the Pacific. For the four months the mainland sits on standard time, Hawaii is two hours behind the West Coast. Once California, Oregon and Washington state spring forward in March, that gap widens to three hours. The distance between Honolulu and New York stretches to six hours during those months. Hawaii's clocks stay put while everyone else's move around them.

Hawaii seldom comes up in the current wave of state bills, because those bills seek permanent daylight saving time and Hawaii locked in the opposite arrangement decades ago. Alongside Arizona, it shows that abandoning the twice-yearly switch is already legal — provided a state accepts earlier sunsets rather than later ones.

Florida helped start the modern push for permanent daylight saving time

Florida passed the original Sunshine Protection Act in 2018, a state law directing Florida to stay on daylight saving time year-round if federal law ever permits it. Then-Gov. Rick Scott signed the measure, and its name was later borrowed for the federal bill that has dominated the debate since.

Supporters in Tallahassee built their case around the state's visitor economy. Later sunsets, they argued, would stretch the hours tourists spend on beaches, golf courses and restaurant patios. Retail businesses would also pick up more after-work foot traffic during the months when darkness arrives before 6 p.m.

The statute cannot operate on its own terms. Federal law lets a state leave daylight saving time and sit on standard time indefinitely, but it offers no mechanism for the reverse. Florida wrote that limit into the bill, making implementation conditional on Congress amending the Uniform Time Act. Without that amendment, the law sits inert in the state code.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio carried the idea to Washington. He introduced a federal version of the Sunshine Protection Act and has reintroduced it across multiple sessions of Congress. The state law and the federal bill share a name and a goal, but only the federal one has the power to change how clocks work.

The 2018 vote came before almost every other state effort described in this list, and the bill's name has traveled since. Lawmakers in other states have used the same title for their own legislation, which is one reason the phrase turns up again and again in statehouse records.

Floridians have seen no change to their clocks in the years since. The state still moves its clocks ahead on the second Sunday in March and back on the first Sunday in November. Arizona never needed permission for its arrangement, since dropping daylight saving time is already legal. Florida picked the one route that depends on another government acting first.

The Sunshine Protection Act stalled in Congress after a rare Senate win

The U.S. Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act by unanimous consent in March 2022, the furthest the proposal had advanced in Congress in decades. The bill then died in the House of Representatives, never reached a floor vote there and never went to President Joe Biden for a signature.

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida sponsored the measure, which would have made daylight saving time the national standard and ended the spring and fall adjustments outright. The Senate vote drew attention as much for its mechanics as its substance. No senator objected, so the bill cleared the chamber without debate or a recorded tally, a procedure usually reserved for routine business.

House opposition formed around winter mornings. Under year-round daylight saving time, sunrise in parts of Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota and Indiana would arrive close to or after 9 a.m. in late December. Lawmakers from northern districts raised the prospect of children waiting at bus stops in full darkness. That objection was never resolved in committee.

The country has tried this before. Congress approved year-round daylight saving time starting in January 1974, a response to the oil crisis and an effort to conserve energy. Public support collapsed within months as dark winter mornings set in, and lawmakers repealed the experiment that October, well ahead of its scheduled expiration. That episode gets raised regularly whenever the idea resurfaces on Capitol Hill.

Rubio has reintroduced the legislation in later sessions. Competing bills have proposed permanent standard time instead, reflecting a real split in Congress over which fixed clock is preferable. None has passed both chambers.

This deadlock is why the state laws covered throughout this list sit unused. Legislatures in Florida, Washington state, Georgia and more than a dozen other states have already recorded their preference for locking the clocks forward. Until the House moves, those statutes stay dormant and their residents keep resetting clocks twice a year.

Washington state passed its law in 2019

Gov. Jay Inslee signed legislation in 2019 putting Washington state on record in favor of permanent daylight saving time. The law carries one condition: Congress must amend federal law first. It has not, so the measure has never taken effect.

The bill cleared both chambers of the Washington legislature with Democratic and Republican votes, an alignment that has held in most statehouses taking........

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