Daylight Saving Time in Sweden

2024 schedule

Sweden keeps CET in winter and shifts one hour forward for the summer.

Time until the next change

Current local time:

Health Considerations for Sweden Residents

The spring transition is the one that hurts. A study in Open Heart found the risk of heart attack rose by about 24% on the Monday after clocks went forward, before falling back to normal within the week. Research published in Current Biology found a 6% rise in fatal traffic accidents in the week following the spring change, with the effect strongest in the morning and in the western parts of time zones.

The autumn change, when most people gain an hour, shows no comparable spike. Researchers attribute the difference to sleep loss rather than to the clock change itself.

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 Sweden 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.

Agricultural Considerations

The story that DST was introduced for farmers has it exactly backwards. Farmers in Sweden and elsewhere were among its most persistent opponents, and the American farm lobby successfully campaigned to have national DST repealed after the First World War.

The reason is straightforward: farm work follows the sun, not the clock. Moving the clock forward just means doing the same work an hour earlier by the clock, while deliveries, markets and hired labour all shift with it. Dairy farmers make the point most often, since cows keep to their own schedule and take several days to adjust to a changed milking time.

Getting ready

• Be extra cautious driving the Monday after the spring time change - accident rates increase.
• Update your car clock, microwave, and other manual clocks that don't auto-update.
• Remember that not all countries change on the same date - check international meeting times carefully.
• Gradually adjust your sleep schedule a few days before the time change to minimize disruption.