The Countries That Gave Up on Daylight Saving
Changing the clocks twice a year is unpopular almost everywhere it happens. Several countries have stopped. What is striking is not that they stopped, but how differently it went, and how often the country that abolished daylight saving then changed its mind about which time to keep.
Russia, which abolished it twice in opposite directions
In 2011 Russia stopped changing its clocks and stayed on summer time permanently. The reasoning was that the biannual change was disruptive and that lighter evenings were worth keeping.
What the country then discovered was what permanent summer time actually feels like at high latitude. Winter sunrises in European Russia slid past nine in the morning, and in some regions well past ten. Children travelled to school in darkness for months. The policy was deeply unpopular within a couple of winters.
So in 2014 Russia abolished daylight saving again, this time in the other direction, settling on permanent standard time, which is winter time. The clocks in Moscow have not moved since. Russia is the clearest natural experiment anyone has run: it tried both permanent options within four years and kept the winter one.
Turkey, which kept the summer
Turkey went the other way and stuck with it. In 2016 it stopped changing its clocks and remained on UTC+3 year round, effectively permanent summer time.
The trade-off is visible in the west of the country, which is a long way from the meridian that offset implies. Winter sunrise in Istanbul comes close to half past eight in the morning. Turkey accepted dark mornings in exchange for usable winter evenings, which is precisely the bargain Russia tried and rejected.
Mexico, which kept a border exception
Mexico ended daylight saving nationally in October 2022, after decades of observing it, on the argument that the energy savings were negligible and the health costs were not.
The interesting part is the exception. A strip of municipalities along the US border continues to change its clocks, because keeping step with the cities on the other side matters more to daily life there than keeping step with the rest of Mexico. Commerce, commuting and cross-border work all run on the American schedule.
The result is that Mexico now has an internal seasonal split: for part of the year the border towns and Mexico City diverge from their usual relationship. The Mexico time zone page shows the current offsets for each city on the site.
Iran, which simply stopped
Iran abolished daylight saving in 2022. Tehran now stays at UTC+3:30 year round, making it one of the few permanent half-hour offsets with no seasonal variation at all.
The European Union, which voted to stop and then did not
This is the most instructive case, because it shows where the idea actually dies.
In 2018 the European Commission ran a public consultation that drew millions of responses, overwhelmingly in favour of abolishing the clock change. In 2019 the European Parliament voted to end seasonal changes, with a target of 2021. Then nothing happened, and nothing has happened since.
It stalled in the Council, where member states have to agree, and they could not. Not on whether to stop, but on which time to keep. Countries in the north and west generally prefer permanent standard time, because permanent summer time would push winter sunrise towards ten in the morning. Countries in the south generally prefer permanent summer time, because their winter mornings are not the problem.
Worse, member states choosing differently would fracture the single market's timekeeping. If France kept summer time and Germany kept standard time, a border that currently has no time difference would acquire one for half the year. Faced with that, the Council did nothing, which is a decision in itself.
The United States, repeatedly, at the final hurdle
The US Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act in 2022 by unanimous consent, which would have made daylight saving permanent. It died in the House without a vote, and versions of it have been reintroduced since without passing.
Americans have been here before. During the 1973 oil crisis the US adopted year-round daylight saving as an energy measure. Public support collapsed over the following winter, largely over children walking to school in the dark, and Congress repealed it inside a year. That episode is still the most cited argument against permanent summer time anywhere.
The pattern
Across all of these, the same shape appears. Abolishing the clock change is popular. Agreeing on what to replace it with is not, because permanent summer time and permanent standard time have genuinely different costs, and those costs fall on different people depending on latitude and on where a country sits within its own zone.
Permanent summer time buys bright evenings at the price of dark mornings. Permanent standard time does the reverse. Every country that has actually tried permanent summer time at high latitude, Russia in 2011 and the US in 1974, has reversed it within a few years. That is the real reason the clocks still change in most of Europe and North America: not inertia about the switch, but deadlock about the destination.
Because this site computes every time live from your browser's own copy of the time zone database, rule changes like these flow through automatically. When a country abolishes daylight saving, the world clock and the comparison pages start showing the new behaviour as soon as the change reaches your device, with nothing to update here.