Daylight saving time: Delaware waiting on Pennsylvania, NJ to make it permanent
A clock is seen in LAquila, Italy, on March 24, 2023. On march 26th (last march sunday) solar time will replace daylight saving time and people around the world will move one hour ahead hands of clocks. (Photo by Lorenzo Di Cola/NurPhoto via Getty Im
DELAWARE - As daylight saving time approaches, the argument to make it permanent in the United States has resurfaced yet again.
One state in the Philadelphia area passed legislation to make the change several years ago, but is still waiting for three other states to make it official.
What we know:
In 2019, former Delaware Gov. John Carney signed a bill to make daylight saving time the standard time all year after it passed both the House and Senate.
The law has been in place for six and a half years, so why does Delaware still change their clocks?
Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland must all enact similar guidelines for daylight saving time to become permanent in Delaware.
Lawmakers in all three states have made efforts to pass similar bills, but none have been signed into law yet. Luckily, Delaware's bill has no sunset date, so there's still hope for those hoping to stop "falling back."
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Two states do not ‘spring forward’
Big picture view:
Hawaii and Arizona are currently the only two states in the U.S. that don't participate in daylight saving time.
Most of Arizona has remained on Mountain Standard Time year-round since 1968 due to its hot climate. However, the state's Navajo Nation does still observe daylight saving time.
Hawaii has used Hawaii Standard Time all year since 1967 due to its proximity to the equator.
The U.S. territories of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands also do not observe daylight saving time.
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What is daylight saving time?
Dig deeper:
Daylight saving time requires most U.S. states and territories to set their clocks forward one hour on the second Sunday of March, and back one hour on the first Sunday of November.
It was first introduced on a national level in 1918 in an effort to conserve fuel by extending daylight working hours during the last year of World War I. In 1966, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act to institute permanent time changes in the spring and fall.
What do Americans want?
By the numbers:
A 2025 Gallup survey found that the majority of Americans wanted to get rid of daylight saving time. Results showed 54% were not in favor of daylight saving time, 40% were in favor and 6% were uncertain.
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Trump on daylight saving time
What they're saying:
President Donald Trump has previously said that he supports making daylight saving time permanent in the U.S.
"The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t," Trump wrote on X in December 2024. "Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation."
In 2025, the president called it a "50-50 issue" before calling on lawmakers to "push hard for more daylight at the end of a day."
The Source: Information from this article was sourced from local legislation, USA Today and Gallup.