Russia does not observe Daylight Saving Time
Russia abandoned clock changes in 2011, spent three years on permanent summer time, then settled on permanent standard time in October 2014.
Russia stays on MSK for the whole year.
Countdown to the next change
Spring transition
Lose an hour of sleep, gain an hour of evening daylight
Autumn transition
Gain an hour of sleep as standard time returns
Longer evenings
Sunset falls an hour later through the summer months
Earlier sunrises
Winter mornings get light sooner once the clocks go back
Technology and Time Changes in 2028
Phones, computers and anything else that syncs with an internet time server handle the transition on their own. What still catches people out in Russia 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?
- Arizona and Hawaii are the only US states that skip DST statewide, along with the territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa and the US Virgin Islands.
- 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 spring transition is associated with a measurable short-term rise in heart attacks and fatal traffic crashes, an effect researchers attribute to the lost hour of sleep rather than the clock itself.
Frequently asked questions
When do the clocks change in Russia in 2028?
They do not. Russia does not observe Daylight Saving Time.
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.