Daylight saving time and meetings

Daylight saving time (DST) is the source of more recurring-meeting confusion than anything else in distributed work. Twice a year, somebody's clock moves an hour and your tidy 09:00 stand-up suddenly happens at 08:00 or 10:00 for half the team. This guide explains exactly why that happens, which regions are affected, and how to keep your calendar steady all year.

What daylight saving actually does

DST is a seasonal shift of one hour, almost always forward in spring ("spring forward") and back in autumn ("fall back"). The aim is to give people more useful daylight in the evening during summer. In practice, DST means that for a few months each year a region's UTC offset is one hour higher than its winter offset. Some places have abandoned DST entirely; others observe it on slightly different weekends.

Who actually observes DST?

Roughly a third of the world's countries observe some form of DST. The big groups are:

• North America (USA, Canada, parts of Mexico): mid-March to early November.
• Europe (EU and UK): late March to late October.
• Australia (NSW, Vic, SA, Tas, ACT): early October to early April. Queensland, WA, NT do not observe.
• New Zealand: late September to early April.
• Brazil: ended DST in 2019.

Most of Asia (including India, China, Japan, Singapore and the Gulf states), most of Africa and most of South America do not observe DST. The result: when the US changes its clocks in March, India's offset relative to the US shifts by an hour even though India did nothing.

Why your meetings drift

The drift comes from two sources:

1. Asymmetric DST. When one side of a call observes DST and the other doesn't, the gap between the two cities changes twice a year. A fixed-time meeting in one zone moves by an hour in the other.
2. Mismatched start dates. Even when both sides observe DST, they may not change clocks on the same weekend. The US enters DST about two weeks before Europe does. For those two weeks, US-Europe meetings shift by an hour relative to their usual rhythm.

How to keep meetings aligned

The single best practice is to anchor every recurring meeting to a single local time zone, ideally the host's. Modern calendar tools (Google Calendar, Outlook, iCalendar/.ics files) all support this: you pick a time zone such as America/New_York and the meeting follows that city through DST. Attendees in other zones will see the meeting time adjust automatically.

Things to avoid:

• Pinning a meeting to "GMT+0" or "UTC" when you actually mean UK local time.
• Copying meeting times into emails and Slack messages. Those copies don't update through DST.
• Using two different anchors for the same meeting (e.g. one team books in NY time, another books in London time). They will eventually disagree.

The "DST mismatch weeks"

For a few weeks each year, the offset between two regions is one hour different from the rest of the year because their DST rules don't line up. Common examples:

• US ↔ Europe: two weeks in March (US is on DST, Europe is still on standard) and one week in early November (US ended DST, Europe still on standard).
• US ↔ UK: same as above; the offset between New York and London narrows from 5 hours to 4 hours during these weeks.
• US ↔ Australia: Australian DST ends in early April; US DST started in mid-March. For about three weeks each spring, the offset between Sydney and the US East Coast is 2 hours smaller than its winter peak.

The future of DST

Several governments have proposed ending DST altogether. The European Parliament voted in 2019 to abolish the mandatory clock change, but implementation has been delayed. The US Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act in 2022, but the bill stalled in the House. For the foreseeable future, expect DST to continue in its current form — and to keep occasionally surprising your team.

FAQ

Related guides

• UTC vs local time explained
• How to plan a multi-zone meeting
• Best time to schedule global meetings
• Time zone abbreviations