2024 time change dates for New South Wales, Australia
At 2:00 AM the clocks jump straight to 3:00 AM in New South Wales, Australia. That hour never happens, and everyone loses an hour of sleep.
At 3:00 AM the clocks return to 2:00 AM, so that hour is lived through twice and the night is an hour longer.
New South Wales, Australia keeps AEST in winter and shifts one hour forward for the summer.
Countdown to the next change
Technology and Time Changes in 2024
Phones, computers and anything else that syncs with an internet time server handle the transition on their own. What still catches people out in New South Wales, 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.
Background
- Benjamin Franklin is often credited with inventing DST, but his 1784 essay was satire — he joked that Parisians could save candles by waking earlier. The modern proposal came from New Zealander George Hudson in 1895 and Briton William Willett in 1907.
- Roughly 70 countries use some form of DST, but they are concentrated in Europe and North America. Most of Africa and Asia do not.
- 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.
Tips for New South Wales, Australia
Set your clocks before going to bed to avoid confusion in the morning.
Use the extra evening daylight in summer for outdoor activities and vitamin D.
Be extra cautious driving the Monday after the spring time change - accident rates increase.
Check and replace smoke detector batteries when changing clocks - it's a good reminder!
Frequently asked questions
When do the clocks change in New South Wales, Australia in 2024?
Clocks go forward on Sunday, October 6, 2024 and back on Sunday, April 7, 2024.
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 has repeatedly passed the Senate without becoming law. Most of the world that changes its clocks is still changing them.