Ideas & Opinions · October 31, 2026 · by Ned

Stop Changing the Clocks

Tonight, most of the country will do something we have done twice a year for decades, and something almost nobody seems to love: change the clocks.

At 2 a.m. on Sunday, November 1, 2026, daylight saving time ends and we “fall back” to standard time. We gain an hour of sleep, at least on paper. Then, on March 14, 2027, we will do it all again in reverse.

It is a strange ritual when you stop and think about it. We do not create more daylight. We just move it around on the clock, and in the process we move millions of people’s sleep, work, school, and driving schedules by an hour overnight.

So why are we still doing it?

The short version

  1. The original energy-saving case barely holds up anymore.
  2. The spring change carries small but real health and safety costs.
  3. Arizona and Hawaii already prove we can just stop switching.
  4. Most Americans agree on stopping — they disagree on which permanent time to keep.
  5. Permanent daylight time and permanent standard time are not the same choice, and the 1974 experiment is a warning.
  6. A 13-month calendar is an even bigger rethink — and a reminder that stopping the clock change is the doable first step.

The original reason does not hold up like it used to

Daylight saving time started in the United States as a wartime energy-saving idea: shift daylight into the evening so people use less artificial light. That made more sense when lighting was a much bigger share of household energy use.

Today, the energy case is thin. A 2008 U.S. Department of Energy study found the extended daylight saving period saved about 0.5% of electricity per day during those extra weeks, and about 0.03% of electricity over the full year. And in Indiana, where some counties adopted daylight saving time in 2006 while others had not, residential electricity use actually went up by about 1%, largely because air conditioning offset the lighting savings.

In other words, at best the energy savings are tiny. At worst, in hot places like Texas, they disappear entirely.

The spring change is the rough one

The fall change gives us an extra hour. The spring change takes one away, and that is where most of the research points.

Losing an hour of sleep sounds small, but studies have found that people lose an average of around 40 minutes of sleep on the Monday after the spring change, and measured sleep has been found to be about 65 minutes shorter on the Sunday of the spring change in recent research.

That disruption lines up with a cluster of short-term effects:

I want to be honest about the limits here. These are mostly short-term, population-level patterns, not proof that changing your clock will cause a heart attack. One famous study found a 24% jump in heart attacks on the Monday after spring forward, but the broader meta-analyses put the average increase much lower, around 4–5%. Some newer studies have found no significant increase at all. The honest summary is not “the clock change kills people.” It is: “we keep running a nationwide sleep experiment twice a year, and the spring version keeps showing up with small but real costs.”

Even if you set the medical studies aside, the everyday costs are obvious. Kids’ sleep schedules get wrecked. Shift workers, parents of toddlers, and anyone with a tight morning routine know exactly what that Monday feels like. Businesses, airlines, hospitals, and schools all have to re-coordinate schedules. It is friction, twice a year, for a benefit that is close to zero.

Arizona and Hawaii already proved we can just… not

Hawaii and most of Arizona do not change their clocks at all. They stay on standard time year-round.

Hawaii is close to the equator, so its day length barely changes through the year. Arizona’s reason is even more relatable here in Texas: in a desert summer, an extra hour of evening sunlight does not save energy, it just means more air conditioning and hotter evenings. Arizona opted out in 1968, Hawaii in 1967, and neither state has collapsed.

The rest of the country could do the same thing. Under current federal law, a state can opt out and stay on standard time year-round on its own. What a state cannot do on its own is pick permanent daylight saving time. That takes Congress.

Most Americans already agree on the first step

This is one of those rare issues where the public is not that divided, at least on the first question.

A YouGov survey in February 2026 found 64% of Americans would like to eliminate changing the clocks twice a year, with only 16% opposed. An AP-NORC poll in October 2025 found only 12% of Americans support the current system of switching twice a year.

Where people disagree is the second question: if we stop switching, which time do we keep?

Stopping the switch is not the same as picking permanent daylight saving time

This is the part that gets lost in the headlines, and it matters.

The Sunshine Protection Act, H.R. 139, would make daylight saving time permanent nationwide. The House passed it on July 14, 2026, by 308–117. As of this writing, it has not passed the Senate, so we are still switching.

Permanent daylight saving time would mean later sunsets year-round, which a lot of people like. It would also mean darker winter mornings, which is a real problem, especially for kids waiting for school buses and people commuting before sunrise.

We have actually tried permanent daylight saving time before. In January 1974, during the oil crisis, Congress made it year-round. Public support collapsed within weeks as children headed to school in the dark, and Congress repealed it before the planned two-year trial finished.

Sleep experts, including the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, have a different recommendation: end the switching, but keep permanent standard time, because morning light is what sets our internal clocks. A competing bill, the Sunshine for Our Kids Act, would do that.

You do not have to agree with the sleep experts on standard versus daylight time to agree on the main point. Both options end the twice-yearly switch. And researchers at Stanford have found that either permanent option is better than switching back and forth.

And while we are rethinking time: what about a 13-month calendar?

If we are willing to question the clock change, it is worth asking a bigger question: why do we accept a calendar that is so uneven in the first place?

Our current Gregorian calendar has months of 28, 29, 30, and 31 days. The 1st of the month falls on a different weekday every month. A “month” of business is not the same length from one month to the next, which makes monthly comparisons messy. We just live with it because we always have.

There is an old proposal that fixes all of that, and it is beautifully simple on paper: the International Fixed Calendar, first presented by Moses B. Cotsworth in 1902.

Here is how it would work: 13 months, each exactly 28 days long. That is 13 × 28 = 364 days, or exactly 52 weeks. The extra month, called Sol, would sit between June and July. Then one extra day, Year Day, would be added at the end of the year to make 365, with a Leap Day in leap years. Neither Year Day nor Leap Day would belong to a week or a month; they would just be holidays.

The payoff is real. Every month would be exactly four weeks. Every month would start on a Sunday and end on a Saturday. Every date would fall on the same weekday every year, so you would never need a new calendar. Birthdays, holidays, payroll, and monthly reports would all line up the same way, every time. Kodak thought it was practical enough to actually use it internally from 1928 to 1989, and the League of Nations once picked it as the best of 130 calendar proposals.

So why did it never happen? For the same reasons big, sensible reforms often do not: the transition would be enormous. Every contract, computer system, legal deadline, and school schedule would have to be rewritten. Thirteen is a prime number, so it does not divide neatly into quarters the way twelve does. Some people did not like the idea of a 13th month on superstitious grounds. And, most seriously, Year Day would break the unbroken seven-day weekly cycle, which drew objections from Jewish and Christian leaders because it would disrupt the weekly Sabbath rhythm.

I bring it up not because I think we are about to adopt a 13-month calendar tomorrow. We are not. I bring it up because it shows the difference between a good idea and a doable idea.

Rebuilding the calendar would require the whole world to agree at once. Stopping the clock change does not. Arizona and Hawaii already did it. A state can do it on its own by staying on standard time. Congress could do it nationally by picking one time and sticking with it. No new month, no blank days, no rewriting every calendar on earth.

If a 13-month calendar sounds appealing to you, then stopping the twice-yearly clock change should sound easy by comparison. It is the same instinct — stop living with a messy, inherited time system just because it is familiar — applied to the one change we can actually make.

My take: pick a time and stick with it

I am not a sleep doctor, and I am not going to pretend this is a simple issue. Evening daylight is genuinely nice in the summer. Morning light genuinely matters in the winter. Different parts of the country, and different latitudes, will feel that trade-off differently.

But the current system gives us the worst of both worlds: we get the dark mornings of daylight saving time in the spring, the lost sleep in March, the schedule chaos twice a year, and we still do not get a stable clock to plan our lives around.

If Congress will not pick, states should at least be free to pick for themselves. And if we are going to pick, we should listen to the people who study sleep for a living, not just the people who like long summer evenings — myself included.

We change the clocks tonight. We will change them again in March. How many more times do we need to do this before we admit the ritual is not worth it?

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