Tonight solar time returns, what time is the 2025 time change and why it hasn't been abolished

Tonight solar time returns, what time is the 2025 time change and why it hasn’t been abolished

In the night between Saturday 25 October And Sunday 26 October 2025 come back againsolar time in Italy: at 03:00 in the morning the hands will move backwards of 60 minutes, giving us an extra hour of sleep and catching up with the arrival of summer time last March. This alternation will bring forward both sunrise and sunset by an hour, leading us to have more sunlight in the early morning but “shortening” the days.

Like every year, thesolar time it will remain in force from the last Sunday of October until the last of March, which next year corresponds to March 29, 2026when daylight saving time will be restored by moving the hands forward from 2:00 in the morning to 3:00.

When the 2025 standard time changes, the hands go back one hour tonight

Between Saturday 25 and Sunday 26 October 2025 there will therefore be the official transition to solar time: the hands they will have to be moved back an hourwith the 03:00 of the morning that will become the 02:00. The change will take place simultaneously throughout the European Union: specifically, solar time is expected to come into force in all EU countries at 1:00 UTC (coordinated universal time, i.e. the Greenwich time zone), which in Italy corresponds, in fact, to 3:00 in the morning.

It must be said, however, that analog clocks will have to be moved manually to align with the new time: all digital watcheslike those on smartphones, will update automaticallywithout the need for any intervention.

Because the alternation with summer time is still in force

In Italy the time change has been officially in force since 1966: according to estimates by Terna (the company that owns the national electricity transmission network), in 2025 summer time allowed a savings total of approx 100 million euroswith a lower energy consumption of approx 330 million kWh (which are equivalent to requirement annual average of over 125,000 families) and a reduction of approximately 160 thousand tons of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere.

Between 2004 and 2024, among other things, summer time allowed overall savings of over 11.7 billion kWh, equivalent to approximately 2.2 billion euros.

Despite the energy advantages of summer time, alternation with solar time is still at the center of numerous debates today: several studies have in fact highlighted the possible negative impacts on health and sleep. Also for this reason, not all countries provide for the time change: today only 40% of the world’s states adopt summer time, with almost all of Asia, a large part of Africa and South America having opted to abolish it.

Within the European Union the discussion has been open since 2018: in 2019 The European Parliament he actually expressed his will to abolish the seasonal transitionbut the directive has remained stuck since the COVID-19 pandemic due to difficulties in reaching agreement on how to set up a “fixed time” system nationwide. In recent days, the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez asked the European Union to speed up the legal process to maintain the same timetable all year round, thus abolishing alternation.