Daylight saving time ends at 2 a.m. local time on Sunday, Nov. 1, and most clocks in most of the United States will fall back one hour to 1 a.m. if Congress does not act first. That change returns the country to standard time, gives many Americans an extra hour of sleep and shifts winter mornings and evenings in the weeks ahead.
People are searching for the date now because the clock change is tied to one of the most familiar turns of the calendar, and it is still on the books for this fall. Daylight saving time begins on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday in November, which means the fallback arrives on Sunday, Nov. 1 unless both chambers of Congress pass legislation to stop it. Several states and U.S. territories already stay on standard time year-round, but most of the United States still follows the twice-yearly switch.
The long-running debate is not about whether people want fewer clock changes. It is about which schedule they prefer. In a 2023 YouGov survey, 62% of Americans said they favored eliminating the twice-yearly change altogether. A January 2025 Gallup poll found 54% wanted to end daylight saving time, but only 24% backed permanent daylight saving time. The gap helps explain why the politics are messy: many people want the disruption gone, yet far fewer want daylight saving time kept all year.
That divide has left Congress stuck. Lawmakers from both parties have spent years pushing proposals to make daylight saving time permanent or abolish the clock change entirely. The Sunshine Protection Act of 2022 passed the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. House of Representatives passed the bill in July to make daylight saving time permanent. But the measure still faces an uphill battle in the Senate, where Senate Majority Leader John Thune has questioned whether it has enough votes. Donald Trump is personally calling politicians to urge support for it and has said, “Hopefully the Senate's going to approve that one.”
For now, the next change is still the old one: most people across the United States will turn their clocks back one hour on Sunday morning and gain a darker evening as winter approaches. The only way that would change is if both chambers of Congress act before the deadline, and there is no sign yet that they will.
