When does daylight saving time end?
Clocks go back, you gain an hour, and one hour of the night happens twice — which is a genuine problem for anything that timestamps things.
The short answer
In 2026: the UK and EU on 2026-10-25, the United States on 2026-11-01.
Clocks go back one hour. Europe ends it about a week before the US, so for that week the transatlantic gap is an hour smaller than normal.
The dates and the rules
| Region | Rule | 2026 | 2027 |
|---|---|---|---|
| UK & European Union | Last Sunday in October, 01:00 UTC | 2026-10-25 | 2027-10-31 |
| United States & Canada | First Sunday in November, 02:00 local | 2026-11-01 | 2027-11-07 |
Note that autumn reverses the spring order. In March the US goes first and Europe follows three weeks later; in autumn Europe goes first and the US follows about a week later.
So there are two out-of-step windows a year, of different lengths, running in opposite directions.
The hour that happens twice
At the end of daylight saving, the clock reaches 2am and goes back to 1am. The hour between 1am and 2am occurs twice.
This is not a curiosity — it breaks things that assume time is monotonic:
- Timestamps become ambiguous. "01:30" that night refers to two different instants, an hour apart. Logs from that window cannot be ordered by local time.
- Shift workers work an extra hour. A night shift spanning the transition is nine hours long, not eight.
- Scheduled jobs can fire twice, if they are defined in local time rather than UTC. Anything that sends an email or moves money at 01:30 will do it twice unless it is idempotent.
- Alarms are unpredictable in that window, depending on the platform.
The defence for anything automated is to define schedules in UTC, which has no transitions at all.
And the hour that does not exist
For completeness, the spring version is the mirror image: the clock jumps from 2am to 3am, and the hour between never happens. A job scheduled for 02:30 local simply does not run that day, and a timestamp of 02:30 that morning is invalid.
"Gaining an hour" is only true once
The extra hour of sleep in autumn is real, on that night. The rest of the adjustment is a shift, not a gain — evenings get dark much earlier, which is the part people actually notice for the following weeks.
What to check
If you have recurring cross-region meetings, the week between 2026-10-25 and 2026-11-01 is when they will be an hour out. If you run scheduled jobs defined in local time, the repeated hour is the night to audit.
Related: When does daylight saving time start? · The clock change: what happens at 2am
Timezone: World Clock Widget
A world clock, converter and live day/night map for iPhone — 325 cities, offline, no account.
Figures on this page are computed from the IANA time zone database. Last generated 2026-08-18.