THE RUNDOWN
Daylight saving takes place in Australia on Sunday, October 4, 2026, at 2:00 am AEST.
Participating states are New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory and South Australia.
Astronomer Dr Laura Dreissen explains that southern states experience dramatic seasonal swings in daylight that make shifting the clocks worthwhile, while tropical northern states sit close enough to the equator that summer daylight hours barely change.
Welcome to the time of year when the days get longer, the sunsets get better, and half the country loses an hour of sleep.
If you are frantically searching to figure out if your alarm will go off at the right time tomorrow morning, you are in the right place. Daylight saving officially begins in Australia on Sunday, October 4, 2026, at 2:00 am.
Do The Clocks Move Forward Or Back?
Spring Forward! For those in participating states, clocks will jump forward one hour from 2:00 am to 3:00 am.
Your Sleep: You will “lose” one hour of sleep on Saturday night (but you’ll gain an hour of evening daylight).
Your Devices: Your smartphone, computer, and smartwatch will automatically update overnight. You will only need to manually adjust your analog wall clocks, microwave, and oven.
When Is Daylight Saving In Your Australian State?
State/TerritoryDo They Observe DST?When Do The Clocks Change? New South WalesYes Sunday, Oct 4 at 2:00 AM (forward 1 hour)Victoria YesSunday, Oct 4 at 2:00 AM (forward 1 hour)South Australia YesSunday, Oct 4 at 2:00 AM (forward 1 hour)Tasmania YesSunday, Oct 4 at 2:00 AM (forward 1 hour)ACTYesSunday, Oct 4 at 2:00 AM (forward 1 hour)Queensland NoStays on AESTWestern AustraliaNoStays on AWSTNorthern Territory No Stays on ACST
Why Is Daylight Saving Different In My State Or City?
Astronomer Dr. Laura Dreissen points out that if you think losing an hour is rough, consider that billions of years ago, a single day on Earth was a pacey 19 hours long. “The gravitational drag caused by the Moon makes the length of day longer by about 2.3 milliseconds every 100 million years,” she explains.
And those drawn-out summer sunsets we love so much? They only happen because the Earth spins on a tilt, travelling through space like a slightly off-balance top. Because of that tilt—and the fact that our orbit is an oval rather than a perfect circle—the sun doesn’t rise and set in the exact same spot every day. Instead, the midday sun traces a slow, invisible figure-eight pattern across the sky throughout the year. Astronomers call this shifting shape an “analemma”— a nice piece of trivia to drop over your next sunset negroni.
When is daylight saving in your Australian state and why is it so different everywhere?
It all comes down to where you sit on the map. The closer a city is to the poles, the more drastic the swing between summer and winter daylight.
“The shortest day (Winter solstice) in Cairns is 11 hours and 7 minutes long, while the longest day (Summer solstice) there is 13 hours and 8 minutes long,” explains Dr. Dreissen. “That’s a difference of 2 hours and 2 minutes. For Hobart, the shortest day (Winter solstice) is 9 hours long and the longest day (Summer solstice) is 15 hours and 20 minutes long. That’s a difference of 6 hours and 20 minutes.”
Down south, shifting the clocks is a lifestyle necessity if you want any semblance of a summer evening. But up north, the seasonal difference is so minor that moving clocks forward isn’t worth the fuss.
“The length of day changes whether or not we have daylight savings,” Dr. Dreissen notes. “What daylight savings does is change when we have that daylight. Places that do have daylight savings are shifting time so that we get more daylight in the evenings according to our watches.”
When Does Daylight Saving End?
Mark your calendars (or just let your phone do the work for you). Daylight saving in Australia runs for exactly six months and will officially end on Sunday, April 4, 2027, at 3:00 am.
Fall Back! At exactly 3:00 am, participating states will roll their clocks back one hour to 2:00 am. Essentially, this is the good one, you will gain an extra hour of sleep on Saturday night, and your morning commute will suddenly be a lot lighter.
As with the start of daylight saving, your smart devices will make the switch automatically overnight.
When Did Daylight Saving Start In Australia?
If you’re wondering who we have to thank (or blame) for this annual temporal shift, daylight savings was first introduced in Australia in 1916 during World War I as a way to save fuel and energy. It was abandoned after the war, briefly resurrected during World War II, and then dropped again.
It wasn’t until 1971 that New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, and the ACT ran a joint trial. Queensland notoriously dropped out the following year, while the southern states decided they preferred their long, twilight evenings and made it a permanent fixture.
Do Other Countries Observe Daylight Saving Time?
If you’re curious about how the rest of the world handles the annual clock change, it is far from universal. Only about a third of the globe actually observes the shift.
Because the entire point of the practice is to maximise evening light during the summer, it is mostly used by countries farther from the equator, where seasonal shifts in daylight are highly noticeable.
Here is how the rest of the world approaches the evening shift:
North America: The United States and Canada widely observe the shift, though some regions opt out (like Arizona, Hawaii, and parts of Saskatchewan). Mexico largely abolished the practice in 2022, save for a few towns along the US border.
Europe: Almost the entire continent, including the UK, is firmly on the daylight savings bandwagon. The few holdouts include Iceland, Russia, Belarus, and Turkey.
Oceania: Outside of Australia’s fractured system, New Zealand fully observes the seasonal shift.
South America: Only a handful of countries participate, primarily Chile and Paraguay.
The Middle East & Africa: Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, and Palestine still change their clocks. Many others, including Iran, Jordan, and Syria, permanently scrapped the practice in recent years.
The Caribbean: Cuba, The Bahamas, Haiti, and Bermuda also observe the seasonal change.
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