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Does Daylight Saving Time End Before Or After Halloween? Here’s When To Turn Your Clocks Back

By Cheryl Phillips
Published on: 14:00 PST, Oct 18, 2015

If you are looking forward to getting an extra hour of sleep when Daylight Saving Time ends, you will have to wait until after Halloween to turn your clocks back. DST comes to an end at 2 a.m. on Sunday, November 1, 2015, just hours after you wash off that Frankenstein makeup and sneak another Three Musketeers Bar out of your kids’ candy bag.

According to Time and Date, people across the nation will be setting their clocks back one hour before they go to bed on Saturday, October 31, so their clocks will show the correct time when they wake up on Sunday morning (November 1). However, the time change doesn’t apply to everyone in the United States.

Web Exhibits reports that Daylight Saving Time is not observed in Arizona (with the exception of the Navajo Nation), Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands.

While getting an extra hour of sleep on Sunday, November 1 sounds great, there is one thing that most people don’t enjoy about Daylight Saving Time ending — less daylight. That’s right, the time change will kick off shorter days and less daylight in the afternoon. However, it won’t be long before it stays lighter longer —Daylight Saving Time begins again on March 13, 2016 at 2 a.m.

If you have trouble remembering whether you are supposed to set your clocks back or ahead one hour, many people keep it straight by remembering to “Fall Back” and “Spring Ahead.” It’s great to “fall back into bed” for an extra hour when DST ends (November 1, 2015), but not as exciting to “spring ahead” out of bed when you lose an hour of sleep as DST begins (March 13, 2016).

Did Daylight Saving Time always end after Halloween? According to AcuRite, the change started in 2007 to protect young children on Halloween. Lawmakers decided to move the end of DST to the first Sunday in November so it wouldn’t be quite so dark when little ghosts and goblins were out trick or treating in the early evening hours.

Why do we change our clocks back and forward an hour twice a year? Time and Date reports that Daylight Saving Time was created “to make better use of the daylight in the evenings” by setting the clocks one hour ahead during the summer and back an hour in the fall. In the United States, the time change was first called “fast time” when first signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson in 1918, but the law was quickly repealed seven months after its inception.

Although President Franklin D. Roosevelt started a year-round Daylight Saving Time in the United States in 1942, there were more changes ahead. The Uniform Time Act was signed into law in 1966 and stated that Daylight Saving Time would start every year on the last Sunday of April and end on the last Saturday of October. The most recent change to DST came in 2007 when it was decided that people in the U.S. would set their clocks back an hour on the first Sunday in November.

Not everyone loves the idea of changing the clocks twice a year. Several states have proposed legislation to put an end to Daylight Saving Time, including Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Texas, Florida, Oregon, Michigan, Missouri, and Wyoming.

Michigan State Rep. Jeff Irwin tells M Live that he hopes a measure to permanently observe standard time eventually gets approved, noting that “changing schedules for daylight saving time is stressful and unnecessary.”

After you gain an extra hour of sleep and start grumbling about the loss of daylight when DST ends on November 1, you’ll have another change to look forward to in just a few months. Daylight Saving Time begins again on March 13, 2016, and you will lose the hour of sleep that you gained in November.

[Image: Joe Raedle, Getty Images News]

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