Permanent Daylight Saving Time
July 17, 2026 at 12:48 PM by Dr. Drang
A couple of days ago, Casey Liss took a break from arguing about temperature scales to tweak me about the recent passage of the Sunshine Protection Act by the House. The Act would make Daylight Saving Time permanent, something Casey knows I disapprove of. A similar bill passed the Senate a few years ago, and Donald Trump has said he will sign this one, so there’s a decent chance it’ll become law. Let’s see what will happen if it does.
First, of course, there will be a lot of cheering from the people who moan about changing their clocks twice a year. Well, some of the moaners will cheer—the ones who wanted to eliminate DST and stay on Standard Time all year will grumble, but they’ll probably still be pleased to be released from that terrible burden.
I’m more interested in the consequences of permanent DST. You may recall my sunrise/sunset plots. Here’s one for Chicago in 2026:
The dirty yellow zones cover the DST period, which currently runs from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November. A small change to the sunplot code extends that zone to the entire year:
I left the Standard Time lines in place for comparison, even though there won’t be any Standard Time if the Act becomes law.
As you can see, there will be a long stretch—more than two months—for which sunrise will be after 8:00.1 I’m sure this won’t bother many of you who don’t do anything before 8:00, but there are lots of people it will bother. And I bet we’ll hear from them, even though a good chunk of them will be from the current cohort of clock-change moaners.
People living near the western edge of a time zone will have even more morning darkness. You may recall my visit to a Louis Sullivan bank in West Lafayette, Indiana, a couple of weeks ago. My photos showed the sun shining on the north side of the bank, which happened because the sun rises late in West Lafayette. (By “late” I mean in local clock time. You could make an argument that the Sun, like Gandalf, is never late. Nor is it early. It rises precisely when it means to.)
Let’s see the sunrise/sunset times in West Lafayette under permanent DST:
Basically five months for which the sun never rises before 8:00. And about seven weeks for which it doesn’t rise before 9:00. No one deserves that—not even Boilermakers.
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Yes, the graph is just for 2026, but sunrise times don’t change all that much from year to year. ↩