Clocks Still Fall Back on November 1 as Senate Blocks Bill to Make Daylight Saving Time Permanent Yet

Americans will still turn their clocks back one hour on Nov. 1, 2026, after the Senate failed to advance legislation that would have ended the twice-yearly time change, leaving the House-passed Sunshine Protection Act stalled amid Republican resistance in the upper chamber.

The U.S. House voted 308-117 on July 14 to make daylight saving time permanent nationwide and eliminate the practice of adjusting clocks each spring and fall. But the Senate's companion bill, S.29, has not advanced, and as of Aug. 2, the legislation had not passed the Senate or been signed by the president. Absent action from Congress before Nov. 1, the biannual clock change will proceed as scheduled under the Uniform Time Act, with most of the country turning clocks back one hour at 2 a.m. local time that Sunday. Hawaii and most of Arizona do not observe daylight saving time and will not be affected by the change.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has expressed reservations about imposing a uniform national clock mandate, and Sen. Tom Cotton has told Thune's office directly that he intends to block the bill from reaching the Senate floor, a position Cotton has also defended publicly in a Senate floor speech. Cotton has warned that permanent daylight saving time would produce pitch-dark winter mornings for schoolchildren, construction workers and farmers across much of the country. A source close to Cotton told Fox News Digital that Cotton remains firmly opposed to allowing the bill to move forward.

Other Senate Republicans have echoed similar concerns rooted in regional daylight patterns. Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota said the proposal simply would not work well for his state given how far north it sits. "It doesn't work in South Dakota," Rounds told reporters, according to Newsweek. Under the House-passed version of the Sunshine Protection Act, most Americans would remain on daylight saving time year-round rather than switching to permanent standard time, eliminating the need to "fall back" each November but pushing winter sunrises roughly an hour later across much of the country. For many northern and Midwestern states, that shift could mean children walking to school before sunrise for weeks at a time during the darkest stretch of winter.

The medical community has raised its own separate objections to the House-passed approach, arguing that Congress has settled on the wrong long-term fix even if the underlying goal of eliminating the biannual clock change is broadly popular. Five major medical organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, oppose permanent daylight saving time specifically and instead endorse permanent standard time, citing concerns about circadian rhythm disruption tied to prolonged periods of darker winter mornings. A Stanford Medicine study published in September 2025 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences similarly found that if Congress ultimately does eliminate the twice-yearly clock change, choosing permanent daylight saving time rather than permanent standard time would leave the public worse off in terms of overall sleep and circadian health outcomes compared with locking in standard time instead.

If the Senate does eventually pass legislation before November, the timing of implementation would depend on the specific language included in the final bill. Under a previous 2022 version of the Sunshine Protection Act, which the Senate passed unanimously but which never became law after stalling in the House, permanent daylight saving time would not have taken effect immediately, with a built-in delay intended to give industries including aviation and rail transportation sufficient time to adjust their schedules. Any version of the bill that eventually clears Congress in 2026 would likely follow a similar delayed implementation structure.

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida has been among the most consistent advocates for eliminating the clock change over the years, having led the push for the original 2022 Senate bill. At the time, Rubio argued that an extra hour of evening sunlight throughout the year would reduce crime rates, ease seasonal depression and give children more time to play outdoors after school. "The good news is if we can get this passed, we don't have to keep doing this stupidity anymore," Rubio said on the Senate floor in 2022. "Hopefully this is the year that this gets done and, pardon the pun, but this is an idea whose time has come."

With Cotton's opposition effectively blocking floor consideration and Thune signaling his own reservations about a national mandate, the path forward for the current version of the Sunshine Protection Act remains highly uncertain heading into the fall. Multiple news organizations reported this week that, absent a breakthrough in the Senate before Nov. 1, most Americans should plan on the standard fall-back time change proceeding as usual, continuing a practice that has remained in place across most of the country for decades despite recurring congressional efforts to eliminate it.