Mike is Michi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Sometime in the early hours of Sunday, October 25, clocks across the European Union and the UK will drop back an hour. At 2 a.m. in London, it becomes 1 a.m. again. At 3 a.m. in Paris, Rome and Berlin, it becomes 2 a.m. Most of us will notice only that Sunday morning feels slightly more generous than usual.
The United States and most of Canada don't follow suit until a week later, on Sunday, November 1. For those seven days, the gap between the two sides of the Atlantic is one hour smaller than normal. New York is four hours behind London instead of five.
If you're at home, that's a curiosity. If you're traveling, booking a connection, or trying to call someone on another continent, it's the kind of thing that causes a missed flight or a very confused 6 a.m. phone call. Here's how to stay ahead of it.
Your phone will cope, your other clocks may not
Smartphones set to update the time automatically will switch on their own, as long as they have a signal or a network connection when the change happens. Laptops usually do the same.
The trouble is everything else. Rental car dashboards, hotel bedside alarm clocks, older watches and the oven in a holiday apartment may all keep the old time until somebody changes them. If you're relying on any of these for an early start on Sunday or Monday, check them against your phone first. I'd also set the phone's alarm as a backup, because hotel alarm clocks are a gamble at the best of times.
If you've switched your phone's time zone to manual for any reason, switch it back to automatic before the weekend.
Flights and trains run on local time
Airline tickets and train timetables always show local time at the place of departure and arrival. So a flight leaving Lisbon at 10 a.m. on October 25 leaves at 10 a.m. on the new clock. The airline does the arithmetic. Your job is simply to make sure your own clock is right.
Overnight journeys on the night of the change are where it gets a bit strange. Between 1 and 2 a.m. in the UK (or 2 and 3 a.m. in much of mainland Europe), the same hour happens twice. Overnight trains and buses scheduled through that window can arrive an hour "early" by the clock unless the operator plans around it, and some European rail operators simply have night trains wait at a station for an hour to stay on timetable. If you're on one, don't panic when you stop somewhere in the middle of nowhere for a while.
For connecting flights booked separately, double check the gap between them if one leg crosses the Atlantic during the week of October 25. Separate bookings don't get the same protection as a single ticket if something goes wrong.
The awkward week for meetings and calls
Calendar apps generally handle time changes well if each event has the correct time zone attached. Problems come from events created as "floating" times or from people doing the maths in their head.
If you work across the Atlantic, assume that any recurring meeting set by one side will shift by an hour for the other side between October 25 and November 1. A 3 p.m. London meeting with a New York team becomes an 11 a.m. call in New York that week instead of the usual 10 a.m. The same thing happens again in spring, because Europe and the U.S. change on different dates in March as well.
For personal calls, a quick message before ringing someone abroad saves a lot of grumpiness.
Not everywhere changes at all
Plenty of places ignore daylight saving time entirely, which makes the picture messier. Most of Arizona and all of Hawaii stay on standard time year round. Mexico dropped daylight saving time for most of the country in 2022, so travelers used to the old pattern should check. Japan, China and India don't change their clocks.
In the Southern Hemisphere, the change goes the other way. New Zealand and parts of Australia moved their clocks forward in late September and early October. That means the time difference between London and Sydney has shifted twice in a matter of weeks. It was nine hours in September, rose to ten when Sydney went forward in early October, and becomes eleven once the UK goes back on October 25. Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory don't use daylight saving time, so Brisbane and Sydney sit an hour apart for the Australian summer.
Use the extra hour wisely
For once, the time change is in travelers' favor. If you're flying west from Europe to North America this weekend, the extra hour of sleep on Sunday morning helps a little. Going the other way is a bit harder on the body, as eastbound travel usually is.
There's also the matter of daylight. After the clocks go back, sunsets in Europe come an hour earlier by the clock. If you're sightseeing in northern cities like Edinburgh, Amsterdam or Copenhagen in early November, plan the outdoor parts of the day for the morning and early afternoon. Museums are a better bet once it gets dark around teatime.
A quick checklist for this week
If you're traveling between now and November 1, a few minutes of checking goes a long way. Confirm your phone is on automatic time. Look at any flight, train or ferry times on October 25 and November 1 and make sure you're reading local time. Check recurring meetings or regular calls with people across the Atlantic for that week, and tell whoever you're meeting which time zone you mean. And if you're staying somewhere with an old-fashioned bedside clock, set it yourself on Saturday night, since nobody else is going to.
