Topic: Equinoxes and Solstices
How does United States mark Equinoxes and Solstices?
Daylight Saving Time
- Local date
- March 8, 2026–November 1, 2026
- When is it?
- Begins at 2 a.m. on the second Sunday in March and ends at 2 a.m. on the first Sunday in November.
The United States takes no holiday for a solstice but moves its clocks twice a year by statute. 15 U.S.C. §260a advances the standard time of every zone by one hour from 2 a.m. on the second Sunday of March until 2 a.m. on the first Sunday of November. A state lying entirely in one time zone may exempt itself by law — Arizona and Hawaii do — and a state split across zones may exempt itself entirely or zone by zone. Subsection (b) declares Congress's express intent to supersede any state or local law setting different dates. The current dates come from the Energy Policy Act of 2005; the rule was also rewritten in 1966, 1972 and 1986. This is the one date on this page a legislature can simply change: 8 March to 1 November in 2026, 14 March to 7 November in 2027, 12 March to 5 November in 2028.
What is this topic?
These are the only holidays whose date nobody chose. The sun reaches a point on the ecliptic and that is the day. What differs is how each state writes that fact into law. Japan made the spring and autumn equinoxes statutory holidays without naming a date, leaves the calculation to its national observatory, and only fixes each year's dates in an official gazette the previous February. Taiwan's holiday act dates exactly two days by solar term and never mentions the winter solstice. In China only one statutory holiday, Qingming, is dated by the sun. India's Makar Sankranti has drifted three weeks away from the solstice it once marked. The United States skipped astronomy altogether and legislated "the second Sunday of March."
Sources and dates
Dates follow local time zones, calendars, and official notices. Check the source when a date is estimated or locally variable.