Time to ‘spring forward’: daylight saving time begins

Get ready to reset your clocks and lose an hour of sleep — daylight saving time is upon us.

Clocks will spring forward an hour at 2 a.m. Eastern time Sunday, meaning one less hour of sleep for most people across the U.S.

The change also means one more hour of sunlight in the evening. Daylight saving time lasts from the second Sunday of March to the first Sunday of November, just under eight months.

With the promise of another round of jarred sleeping schedules and clock confusion, biannual debates on the subject again are kicking into high gear.

Despite heavy debate on the practice, about 40% of countries worldwide — including much of Europe and parts of Canada and Australia — opt to participate in what Americans call daylight saving time.

The time change practice first was proposed in the 1890s by an astronomer and entomologist — or insect researcher — in New Zealand, but the idea didn’t gain traction until World War I. Germany began adjusting its clocks during the first world war with the idea the practice would save energy. The U.S., among other countries, soon followed.

The time change, then called “war time,” was more permanently reinstated in the U.S. during World War II and continued. The practice was formalized across states in the Uniform Time Act of 1966. The Act allows states to opt out and observe standard time but not to observe daylight saving time year-round. The country briefly adopted year-round daylight saving during an energy crisis in the 1970s, but opponents shut down the change quickly.

Congress has taken up the issue of whether to ditch daylight saving, proposing bills to make daylight saving time permanent — the Sunshine Protection Act, which was approved by the Senate in 2022 — and allow states to opt for permanent daylight saving time.

Hawaii and Arizona are the only states that elect to remain on standard time all year round. U.S. territories American Samoa, Guam, the North Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands also opt to not fiddle with their clocks twice a year.

Arizona ditched the time change in 1967 to avoid an extra hour in the sun during their hottest months, while Hawaii and territories opted out because the time change has so little effect closer to the equator.