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Which countries in the world will adopt the change between standard and summer time in 2024? The map

The map of the countries that will adopt summer time in 2024. Credit: timeanddate.com

On the night between Saturday 26 October and Sunday October 27, 2024 solar time will return in Italy: the clocks will move back an hour from 3:00 to 2:00, thus “retiring” daylight saving time until next spring. In our country the alternation between solar time and summer time was introduced for the first time in 1916 and it has been happening steadily since 1966so it may seem like an “obvious” and normal practice, but this is not the case. Daylight saving time is in effect around 40% of the countries in the world and in 140 countries it has been applied at least once.

To be precise, they are 71 the States in which in at least one part of the territory the clocks move back one hour in a certain period of the year: as you can see from the map, these are mainly the countries ofEuropean Union and other European states (with some exceptions including Iceland, Russia and Belarus), much of North America (except Arizona and Hawaii in the USA and some provinces of Canada), Egypt (which introduced the practice in 2023) and Morocco (which uses daylight saving time during Ramadan), two states in Australia and New Zealand, as well as Chile and Paraguay in South America.

This number changes continuously: in 2015, for example, daylight saving time was active in 79 countries. This number dropped to 77 in 2016, 75 in 2018, 73 in 2021, and 71 in 2023. The decreasing trend is partly due to controversy surrounding the practice, linked to health concerns and effects on sleep . The debate on the abolition of summer time in EU countries and Italy has continued since 2018.

In total, they are beyond 140 countries which historically have adopted or continue to adopt the alternation between summer time and standard time. Among the countries that have abolished daylight saving time we find almost all of Asia, a good part of South America and Central America, the countries of Mediterranean and southern Africa, and three states of Australia.

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In green are the countries that will adopt summer time in 2024. In blue are those that have adopted it at least once in the past. Credit: timeanddate.com

The last country to introduce summer time was Egypt in 2023 (the previous one was the Norfolk Island Territory in 2019) and the last to abolish it were Iran, Syria and Jordan in 2023. Among the countries that have never adopted it, there are mainly those along the equator, such as Southeast Asia, Venezuela and equatorial Africa, where the purpose of the practice is partly defeated by the fact that at the equator day and night have the same duration all year round.