Daylight After 5 p.m.: 50 Cities Ranked by Evening Light Lost to the Clock Change

The two dates come straight from the federal calendar. For 2026, the National Institute of Standards and Technology lists daylight saving time as running from March 8 to November 1 at 2 a.m., when local time steps back to 1 a.m. and that hour repeats. That makes Halloween the last evening on the old clock, and the following Saturday a clean one-week comparison on the new one.

The city list is the 50 largest metropolitan statistical areas in the Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 population estimates, which run from New York at about 20.1 million people down to Hartford at about 1.17 million. Each metro is represented by one coordinate, the Census internal point of its first-named city.

For each coordinate and each date we calculated sunset ourselves, using the published astronomical equations that sit behind most sunrise and sunset tables. Sunset here follows the standard convention described by the U.S. Naval Observatory: the moment the center of the sun sits 90.8333 degrees from straight overhead, which allows for the sun's apparent radius and the bending of light near the horizon. Each sunset was rounded to the nearest minute before any subtraction, so every row of the table adds up exactly.

From there the arithmetic is simple enough to do on a napkin:

• Minutes after 5 p.m. is sunset minus 5:00 p.m. on the local clock. If the sun sets before 5:00, the value is zero rather than a negative number.
• Minutes lost is the October 31 value minus the November 7 value.
• From the season is what the city would have lost if nobody had touched the clocks, which is just the week's natural drift in sunset.
• From the clock is whatever remains.

That last pair always sums to the total, even in cities where the sunset falls below the 5 p.m. line.

Here is the full table, running from the smallest loss at number 50 to the largest at number 1. All sunset times are p.m. on the local clock in force that day.

Among the 49 metros that change their clocks, the loss runs from 39 minutes in Boston to 69 minutes in Grand Rapids, Detroit and Cleveland, with a median of 65. Honolulu sits below the table as a reference row because its metro area ranks 57th by population, outside the 50.

The natural way to read a ranking like this is that number 1 had the worst week. Here, that reading turns upside down, and it is worth slowing down to see why.

A city cannot lose more daylight after 5 p.m. than it had to begin with. Boston starts the week with 39 minutes on the far side of five o'clock. Setting the clock back an hour would take 60, but there are only 39 to take, so 39 is the loss. By November 7 the sun is setting there at 4:30 p.m., and the evening column reads zero.

Grand Rapids starts with 96 minutes. It hands over the full clock hour, plus 9 more to the season, and still has 27 minutes of daylight after 5 p.m. when the week is over. On paper it lost the most. In practice it is one of the better-lit evenings in the table.

The pattern holds across all 50 metros:

• 28 metros lose the full 60 clock minutes. Every one of them still has a sunset at or after 5:00 p.m. on November 7.
• 21 metros lose fewer than 60 clock minutes, from 30 in Boston to 59 in Baltimore and Sacramento. Each of them falls short only because its sunset dropped below the 5 p.m. line.
• 22 metros finish the week with no daylight after 5 p.m. In 21 of them the sun sets before 5:00. In the last, Memphis, it sets at 5:00 on the dot.

So the table carries two stories, and they point in nearly opposite directions. Ranked by minutes lost, the top belongs to the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley. Ranked by what remains, the top belongs to San Antonio with 43 minutes, followed by Tampa with 41, Atlanta with 40 and Austin with 39. If your question is how much evening you gave up, the first ranking answers it. If your question is how much evening you have now, look at the November 7 column instead.

This is also a different picture from the one in our earlier count of daylight lost between the equinox and Halloween, where Seattle finished first. Seattle ranks 42nd here. It loses a great deal of total daylight across the fall, but by Halloween its sunset is already at 5:53 p.m., so there are only 53 minutes left above the line for the clock to remove.

Between October 31 and November 7, the sunset in every clock-changing metro moves 64 to 70 minutes earlier on the clock. Sixty of those minutes are the clock. The rest is the planet doing what it does every autumn.

That seasonal slice is small and it scales with latitude. In Miami it is 4 minutes for the week. In Tampa, Orlando, Houston, Austin and San Antonio it is 5. Across most of the table it is 6 to 8. In Boston, Detroit, Cleveland, Grand Rapids, Milwaukee and Minneapolis it is 9, and in Seattle and Portland it reaches 10. In round terms, the season accounts for about a tenth of the week's lost evening and the clock accounts for the other nine-tenths, wherever a city had a full hour to give.

The clearest way to see the season by itself is to look at a place where the clock never moves. Federal law allows a state to opt out of daylight time, and the Department of Transportation lists Hawaii and most of Arizona among the places that do not observe it. That makes Phoenix and Honolulu natural controls.

Phoenix has a 5:37 p.m. sunset on October 31 and a 5:31 p.m. sunset on November 7. It loses 6 minutes of daylight after five, every one of them seasonal. Honolulu goes from 5:56 to 5:52 and loses 4. That is what the week looks like with no clock change at all.

Now compare Phoenix with Las Vegas, about 250 miles to the northwest and on a clock that does change. Las Vegas goes from a 5:46 p.m. sunset to a 4:39 p.m. sunset and loses all 46 of its minutes. There is a neat reversal tucked inside the Phoenix row, too. On Halloween, Phoenix has the least daylight after 5 p.m. of all 50 metros, because its clock was never moved forward in the spring. A week later its 31 minutes is more than 38 of the other 49 metros have.

The opt-out is all-or-nothing by design. The underlying federal statute sets the changeover at 2 a.m. on the first Sunday of November and lets a state that sits within one time zone exempt itself only if the entire state stays on standard time. A city cannot go its own way, which is why the control group is so small.

If latitude sets the seasonal slice, something else sets how much evening a city has in the first place. That something is where the city sits inside its time zone.

Everyone in a time zone reads the same clock, but the sun reaches the eastern side of the zone first. A city on the eastern edge gets its sunset early by the clock, and a city on the western edge gets it late. Boston and Grand Rapids make a tidy pair. They sit at nearly the same latitude, about 42 to 43 degrees north, and both are on Eastern time. On November 7 the sun sets at 4:30 p.m. in Boston and at 5:27 p.m. in Grand Rapids, 57 minutes apart.

You can see the same thing all through the table. Indianapolis at 5:36 p.m., Louisville at 5:37 and Atlanta at 5:40 are all on the western side of the Eastern zone, and all three keep more than half an hour of daylight after five. Providence at 4:33 and Hartford at 4:38 are on the eastern side, and both end at zero. In the Central zone, San Antonio and Austin sit far to the west and keep two of the four latest sunsets in the table, while Chicago and Milwaukee sit to the east and see the sun set before 4:40 p.m.

Those zone boundaries are not natural features. They are drawn in federal regulation, in the standard time zone boundaries that trace the Eastern and Central line through Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and Michigan. Where that line was drawn decades ago has more to do with a city's place in this ranking than how far north it is.

The evening's loss is mostly a transfer. The hour that leaves the end of the day reappears at the start of it.

In the 49 clock-changing metros, sunrise on November 7 comes 49 to 56 minutes earlier by the clock than it did on October 31. The clock gives back 60 minutes and the season takes 4 to 11 of them away. This is most visible in the same western-edge cities that top the evening ranking. On Halloween, sunrise is at or after 8:00 a.m. in six metros: Grand Rapids at 8:16, Indianapolis at 8:12, Louisville at 8:08, Detroit and Cincinnati at 8:05, and Columbus at 8:00. A week later the latest sunrise among the 50 is 7:25 a.m., in Grand Rapids. Phoenix, with no clock change, simply drifts 7 minutes later, from 6:46 to 6:53.

Set the two ends of the day side by side and the real change in daylight is modest. The total length of the day shrinks by just 8 minutes in Miami over the week, and by 21 minutes in Seattle, which is the largest drop among the 50.

There is one more piece of good news for the 22 metros that end at zero. Sunset is not the moment the light goes out. Civil twilight, the period when the sun is no more than 6 degrees below the horizon, carries on for a while afterward. On November 7 it ends 23 to 32 minutes after sunset across these metros. Count the evening to the end of civil twilight and the picture softens:

• Boston is the only metro with nothing left after five. Civil twilight ends there at 5:00 p.m. exactly.
• Providence has 2 minutes, Las Vegas and Milwaukee have 6, and Chicago and Hartford have 7.
• San Antonio has 68 minutes of sunlight-plus-twilight after five, and Atlanta and Tampa have 66.

On October 31 the same measure ranged from 63 minutes in Phoenix to 133 in San Antonio.

A table this precise deserves an honest account of its edges.

We checked every figure against an independent source. For all 50 metros plus Honolulu, on both dates, we compared our sunrise, sunset and end-of-twilight times with the Naval Observatory's one-day sun and moon data service. That made 102 lookups and 306 individual comparisons. In 297 of them the two answers matched to the minute. In the other 9 they differed by one minute, and never by more. Using the observatory's times instead of ours, three cities would each show a loss one minute lower: Cleveland at 68, Jacksonville at 65 and Richmond at 67.

One minute is also about as fine as this kind of calculation can honestly go. The observatory itself notes that actual sunset depends on atmospheric conditions near the horizon that cannot be predicted, and that computed times may be off by a minute or more. The equations we used are the ones published by NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory, which now carries a notice that its online calculator is no longer actively maintained and is intended for research and recreational use. We treated the equations as the method and the Naval Observatory as the referee.

A few other things are worth knowing as you find your own city:

• One point stands in for a whole metro. Sunset can differ by a few minutes between the eastern and western suburbs of a large metro area, so your own street may be slightly ahead of or behind the table.
• The Census point is not always downtown. It is a point inside the city's legal boundary. San Francisco's falls offshore because the city limits include the Farallon Islands. The effect on sunset is small, and we have left it as published rather than adjust it by hand.
• The horizon is assumed to be flat and clear. Hills, tall buildings and cloud cover are not part of the calculation. A city ringed by mountains will see the sun disappear earlier than the table says.
• The averages are simple averages of 50 metros. They are not weighted by population.

None of this changes the shape of the result. It simply means the table is best used the way you would use a good map: reliable for the big picture and close enough for the details.