New Zealand keeps daylight saving time from the last Sunday in September until the first Sunday in April. For 2027 that puts the end on 4 April, at 3:00 a.m., which is turned back to 2:00 a.m., and the new start on 26 September, when the clock skips from 2:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. The whole country changes together, and it does so for longer than almost anywhere else: 27 weeks of the year are on daylight time.

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Next clock change in New Zealand

Local time in each place. Computed from the IANA time zone database.

All clock changes 2026–2028: Auckland / Wellington

The Rule: Last Sunday in September, First Sunday in April

New Zealand Standard Time is twelve hours ahead of Universal Time and New Zealand Daylight Time thirteen. Clocks go forward at 2:00 a.m. standard time and back at 3:00 a.m. daylight time. The current dates have applied since 2007, when the government added three weeks after a petition showed strong public support for longer evenings; before that the period ran from the first Sunday in October to the third Sunday in March. Because New Zealand is the first sizeable country to see each new day, it is also the first to change its clocks on each changeover night, some hours before Australia and most of a day before Europe and America.

The Man Who Invented It Lived in Wellington

The first serious proposal for daylight saving anywhere came from New Zealand. George Vernon Hudson, a clerk at the Wellington post office and a self-taught entomologist, wanted more daylight after his shift to collect insects. In 1895 he presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society proposing a two-hour shift in summer, and was laughed at. He published a second paper in 1898. The idea was taken up by the member of parliament Thomas Sidey, who introduced a bill almost every year from 1909 until the Summer Time Act passed in 1927. New Zealand then spent some years on a half-hour summer shift, and in 1946 made that half-hour permanent as its standard time.

The Chatham Islands and Other Corners

The Chatham Islands, 800 kilometres east of the South Island, keep a time 45 minutes ahead of the rest of New Zealand, one of very few places in the world with a three-quarter-hour offset. They change on the same night: when it is 2:00 a.m. in Wellington it is 2:45 a.m. on the Chathams, and that is when their clocks move. Tokelau, the Cook Islands and Niue, which are associated with New Zealand, do not use daylight saving. Nor does New Zealand's Antarctic station, Scott Base, in any natural sense, but it keeps New Zealand time, including the changes, because its supply flights leave from Christchurch. So does the American station at McMurdo next door.

Born in New Zealand? What to Check for a Birth Chart

New Zealand birth times fall into three periods. Before 1946, standard time was eleven and a half hours ahead of Greenwich, with a half-hour or one-hour summer shift from 1927. From 1946 to 1974 the clock was twelve hours ahead all year, with no summer time at all. Daylight saving returned as a trial in the summer of 1974 to 1975 and has been used every year since, with the dates lengthened in 1990 and again in 2007. So a January birth in 1965 is on standard time and a January birth in 1985 is an hour ahead. The half-hour of the old standard time matters as well: thirty minutes are seven or eight degrees of Ascendant, an hour about fifteen. Our natal chart calculator applies all three periods, the half-hour years included.

Frequently asked

When does daylight saving end in New Zealand in 2027?

It ends on Sunday 4 April 2027: at 3:00 a.m. the whole country turns its clocks back to 2:00 a.m.

When does daylight saving start in New Zealand in 2027?

On Sunday 26 September 2027, when 2:00 a.m. is skipped and the clock reads 3:00 a.m.

Who invented daylight saving time?

The first detailed proposal was made in 1895 by George Hudson, an entomologist in Wellington, New Zealand. William Willett proposed it independently in Britain in 1907.

Clock changes by country