Which Countries Don't Use Daylight Saving Time?

Which countries don't use daylight saving time?

Most of them. Daylight saving time — the practice of advancing the clock by an hour in the warmer months and putting it back in the colder ones — is the exception, not the rule. Of the 312 time zones the IANA Time Zone Database tracks for inhabited regions (the public dataset that every major operating system reads to know the rules), only 105 still change their clocks each year; the remaining 207 keep a single, year-round offset from Coordinated Universal Time.¹ The clock-changing countries are concentrated in North America, Europe, and the southern parts of Oceania. Across most of Africa, almost all of Asia, and the entire belt of countries near the equator, the clocks never move.

For the places that do change, the dates and the mechanics are covered separately in when do the clocks change; this page is the inverse — the roundup of who stays on standard time all year. The table below is a representative selection rather than a complete census: the full non-observing list runs to well over a hundred countries, so it samples the larger ones in each region.

Two further patterns matter. A country can keep daylight saving in part of its territory while most of it drops the practice — the United States and Australia both do this — and a country's status can flip when its government legislates, which is why the only authoritative, current list is the tz dataset itself rather than any fixed table.¹

Why don't countries near the equator use daylight saving time?

Because there is almost nothing to save. Daylight saving works by shifting an hour of daylight from the early morning, when many people are asleep, to the evening, when they are awake — a trade that only pays off where the length of the day swings widely between the seasons. Near the equator it does not. As the United States National Weather Service puts it, the effect of the seasons on the length of daylight over the equator is "not much": "If you live on or very close to the equator, your daylight would be basically within a few minutes of 12 hours the year around."⁴

The seasonal swing grows with latitude. The daylight difference "is subtle in the tropics, but becomes extremely large in the northern latitudes," reaching the point above the Arctic Circle where the Sun does not set for weeks in summer and does not rise for weeks in winter.⁴ A country sitting close to the equator therefore has roughly twelve hours of daylight every day of the year, and moving its clocks would shuffle that fixed daylight around to no practical end. This is the structural reason the equatorial belt — much of South America, central Africa, and South-East Asia — has never taken up the practice.

Which countries have abolished daylight saving time?

Several large countries adopted daylight saving and later dropped it, and the trend in recent decades has been toward abolition rather than adoption.

Russia stopped switching its clocks seasonally in 2011, when a law fixed the country on permanent summer time. The experiment proved unpopular through the dark winter mornings, and a federal law signed in 2014 moved the country onto permanent standard time instead, effective 26 October 2014; Russia has not changed its clocks since.² Turkey followed a similar path: in September 2016 the government announced that the country would "stay in Daylight Saving Time even in winter," making its summer offset of three hours ahead of Coordinated Universal Time the new year-round standard time.²

Mexico abolished daylight saving time nationwide at the end of 2022. A new federal time-zone law, published in the official gazette and taking effect on 30 October 2022, ended the seasonal change across the country "except where US DST rules are observed" — a strip of northern municipalities along the United States border that keep daylight saving to stay synchronised with neighbouring American cities for cross-border trade.³ The pattern across these cases is consistent: clocks settle onto one offset, and a small carve-out is sometimes kept where a land border with a clock-changing neighbour makes synchronisation worth more than uniformity at home.

Does the United States use daylight saving time?

Yes — but not everywhere. Most of the United States springs forward on the second Sunday of March and falls back on the first Sunday of November, the schedule set by the Energy Policy Act of 2005.⁵ Two states and the overseas territories opt out. As the National Institute of Standards and Technology states, "DST is not observed in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the state of Arizona (with the exception of the Navajo Indian Reservation, which does observe DST)."⁵

Arizona's exception has the longer history: the state observed daylight saving in 1967 but repealed it the following year, and has kept standard time all year ever since.³ The Navajo Nation, whose territory spans Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, observes daylight saving so that its own clocks stay uniform across the three states.³ Hawaii, which lies close enough to the equator that its daylight barely varies, has not changed its clocks since the 1940s.³ A state may stay on permanent standard time, as Arizona and Hawaii do, but under current federal law it cannot unilaterally adopt permanent daylight saving time.

How often does this list change?

Often enough that any fixed list ages. Daylight saving is set by sovereign governments, and the roster of observing countries shifts whenever one legislates — Russia in 2014, Turkey in 2016, and Mexico in 2022 are recent examples, and others continue to revisit the question. For that reason the headline counts on this page (105 observing, 207 not, of 312 zones) are not typed in by hand: they are computed at build time directly from the IANA time-zone dataset, by checking whether each zone's clock differs between January and July of the current year.¹

The region groupings above are reviewed against the tz database's change announcements at least twice a year, around the two windows — late March and late October — when most clock-change rules and abolitions take effect. The IANA dataset is the operational source of truth for which zones carry daylight-saving rules; where this page and that dataset ever disagree, the dataset is correct.¹

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