Daylight saving in Australia starts on Sunday, October 4, 2026, when clocks in New South Wales, Victoria, the ACT, Tasmania and South Australia go forward one hour at 2:00 AM local time. It ends on Sunday, April 4, 2027. Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory do not change their clocks at all.
🍂 Fall Back
3:00 AM → 2:00 AM · gain an hour
🌸 Spring Forward
2:00 AM → 3:00 AM · lose an hour
Which Australian states have daylight saving?
Only the south-east of the country changes its clocks. These states and territories move forward one hour on October 4, 2026:
- New South Wales — AEST to AEDT, UTC+10 to UTC+11.
- Victoria — AEST to AEDT, UTC+10 to UTC+11.
- Australian Capital Territory — same change as New South Wales.
- Tasmania — AEST to AEDT, UTC+10 to UTC+11.
- South Australia — ACST to ACDT, UTC+9:30 to UTC+10:30.
Three do not observe daylight saving: Queensland stays on AEST, the Northern Territory on ACST and Western Australia on AWST all year. That is why, from October to April, Sydney runs an hour ahead of Brisbane even though both are on the east coast, and the mainland uses five time zones instead of three.
Countdown to the next change
Autumn transition
Gain an hour of sleep as standard time returns
Spring transition
Lose an hour of sleep, gain an hour of evening daylight
Longer evenings
Sunset falls an hour later through the summer months
Earlier sunrises
Winter mornings get light sooner once the clocks go back
Economic Impact of DST in Australia
The economic effects of Daylight Saving Time in Australia are real but modest, and studies disagree on their size. Retailers and hospitality businesses generally favour DST, arguing that lighter evenings encourage shopping, dining out and other after-work spending — the US retail lobby was one of the main forces behind the 2005 extension of the DST period.
The transitions themselves carry a cost. Research from Chmura Economics has put the one-off economic cost of the spring change in the United States at roughly $430 million a year, driven by lost productivity, workplace injuries and the health effects of a disrupted night's sleep.
Does DST Actually Save Energy?
This was the original justification, and it is the claim that has held up worst. A US Department of Energy report to Congress in 2008 measured the four weeks added to DST in 2007 and found a saving of about 0.5% of daily national electricity use — real, but small.
Other work has found no saving at all. A well-known study of Indiana, which adopted DST statewide in 2006, found residential electricity use actually rose by 1–4%: households used less lighting but more air conditioning on hot summer evenings. Any lighting savings are also partly offset by extra petrol use as people travel more in the lighter evenings.
Technology and Time Changes in 2026
Phones, computers and anything else that syncs with an internet time server handle the transition on their own. What still catches people out in Australia is the long tail of devices that don't: car dashboards, ovens and microwaves, wall clocks, older thermostats, and cheap alarm clocks with a DST setting hard-coded to a schedule that has since changed.
For anyone running servers, the transitions are a recurring source of bugs — duplicated or missing local timestamps around the changeover, cron jobs that fire twice or not at all, and stale operating system timezone databases. Storing timestamps in UTC and keeping the tzdata package current avoids almost all of it.
Did you know?
- Germany and Austria-Hungary were the first countries to adopt DST nationally, in April 1916, as a wartime fuel-saving measure.
- The energy case for DST is weak by modern standards. A US Department of Energy study in 2008 found savings of about 0.5% of daily electricity use, and other studies have found no saving at all.
- The European Parliament voted in 2019 to end mandatory clock changes, but member states never agreed on which time to keep, so the change has stalled indefinitely.
Frequently asked questions
When do the clocks change in Australia in 2026?
Clocks go forward on Sunday, October 4, 2026 and back on Sunday, April 5, 2026.
Which way do the clocks go?
"Spring forward, fall back" is the usual mnemonic: forward one hour in spring, back one hour in autumn.
Do I have to change anything myself?
Phones, computers and anything that syncs over the internet update on their own. Car clocks, ovens, microwaves and older wall clocks generally do not.
Is Daylight Saving Time being scrapped?
It has been proposed in many places and adopted in few. The European Parliament voted in 2019 to end mandatory clock changes and the change has stalled; in the United States the Sunshine Protection Act passed the Senate in 2022 but never became law. Most of the world that changes its clocks is still changing them.
Related guides
- Daylight saving in New Zealand 2026 — starts a week earlier, on September 27.
- Australia daylight saving 2027 — when it ends in April and starts again in October.
- Daylight Saving Time 2026 — DST dates for every region that observes it.